The Only Actual Solution to the Problems of Higher Education

Major in something you care about, and care about what you major in

We’re in the period of waning summer where students and faculty are gearing up or girding themselves for the return to college in the next few weeks. This is also the time when higher-ed Takes wriggle out of the earth like dormant cicadas and start to fill the #discourse with a pervasive buzz that alternates between “kind of real” and “kind of batshit.” Sometimes both at once¹.

This year’s brood of Takes includes the usual angst about the distribution of students across major areas, which this year has been complicated by various policy grenades lobbed indiscriminately into the higher ed sector from the Trump administration². There’s also a big dose of anxiety about the roiling cauldron of linear algebra that’s presently being marketed as “Artificial Intelligence” and What It Means from both the faculty and student sides. It’s going to be a rough back-to-school season, folks.

From the prompt “giant cicadas in human clothes walking around a college campus”

We had several questions about these issues at the Schrödinger Sessions workshop last week, including one at the panel I mentioned in Wednesday’s post, where somebody who’s organized “informal education” events expressed frustration with the fact that post-event surveys of attendees show that while they had a good time, the event didn’t increase their interest in learning more. In fact, it tended to decrease interest. This is a pretty general phenomenon that shows up in basically all of the research I’ve seen on these things, and is generally good for a lengthy discussion any time three or more people in the business get together³.

As I said at the workshop, I’m not super concerned about this, in part because I’ve spent a lot of time over the last quarter-century talking with prospective students and parents about our physics and astronomy program, and lack of interest in the subject generally isn’t the issue. The usual conversation is more along the lines of “My kid is interested in physics, but what do you even do with a degree in that?” This happens because we’re in a bit of a weird spot for a STEM major in not having a super obvious connection to a well-known lucrative career field. Parents and students immediately link Bio majors to medical fields, Chem to medicine or drug development, Computer Science to becoming a rich douchebag peddling apps, and of course the various Engineering fields lead to careers designing and building stuff⁴. Most people have a sense of how people with those degrees achieve financial security, but there aren’t a lot of people running around with “physicist” in their job title, so it’s less clear to the average parent that it’s a “safe” subject to major in (and that’s even before you bring Astronomy into the mix).

My job in those conversations is less about convincing students that our subject is intrinsically interesting— we’ve usually got an adequate number of people coming in thinking that physics is a cool subject— but about creating a permission structure that says it’s okay to major in physics. Our graduates aren’t going hungry, at least in the long term (the ones who go to grad school can probably expect some lean years…). I explain the various pathways involving further education (faculty, research scientists, high school teachers, etc.), and that there are, in fact, plenty of employers who are happy to hire physics majors directly out of undergrad, even if many of the jobs have “engineer” in the title. I basically just have to be sympathetic and reassuring, and that generally works. In the end, we don’t need a ton more people to be interested in getting physics degrees so much as we need to give the ones who already are interested permission to pursue that interest— in that sense, it’s a lot like the public communication issue that I talked about a bit in Monday’s post.

Pulling out a bit, I do think there’s a sense in which this kind of thing is at least a step toward the admittedly clickbait-y title of this post, namely addressing a lot of the the problems facing higher education. Most of the problems causing angst in higher education in the year 2778 ab urbe condita come from the student and family side, and that means that fixing them needs to come from there, as well. Students and parents need to feel that they have permission to major in a subject they care about, and act on that.

I actually don’t think there’s a ton that institutions and individual faculty can do about this that isn’t already being done. Basically every discipline already pushes out a ton of content about how their (sub)speciality is uniquely suited to teaching Critical Thinking Skills⁵ and thus preparing students for The Careers of Tomorrow. There are tweaks that can be made to the presentation, and maybe shifts in topical coverage that could make some fields more attractive, but in the end the issue is more with students and faculty being willing to hear and embrace that message.

I do think, though, both as a career academic and as the parent of a rising high-school senior⁶ that this is the only actually useful advice about choosing a college major (and thus to some extent choosing a college): Major in something you care about, and care about what you major in. You’ll get a better education, you’ll have a better experience,and you’ll be a better person, and actual success in life is downstream from those things.

The second part of that generic college advice (“care about what you major in”) is also, I think, the only real solution to the “AI” problem that’s generating so much of the higher-ed #discourse these days. The root cause of problems with AI slop isn’t anything technological, it’s a students not seeing the value of what they’re being asked to do. Like anyone else, when college students feel they’re being asked to do bullshit tasks, some fraction of them are going to resort to bullshit means of completing those tasks, which in 2778 a.u.c. will sometimes involve LLMs. You can, to some extent, impede this through procedural means— in-person exams, and the like— but that’s not addressing the real issue.

I’ve long been a fan of Rhett Allain’s line that “confusion is the sweat of learning”— that if you’re never confused on a class assignment, you’re like one of those people in the fitness center who say they’re working out but are really just hanging out. Which means I really liked this aside in a longer post about “AI” from Adam Mastroianni:

That’s also why I see no point in using AI to, say, write an essay, just like I see no point in bringing a forklift to the gym. Sure, it can lift the weights, but I’m not trying to suspend a barbell above the floor for the hell of it. I lift it because I want to become the kind of person who can lift it. Similarly, I write because I want to become the kind of person who can think.

(I also really like the “bag of words” framing, so you should click through and read the whole thing…)

The key to getting students to actually write things, and not resort to lazy shortcuts, is for them to want to become the kind of person who can think and act in the manner that will be developed by writing the thing. That is, for them to care about what they’re majoring in. And secondarily, for there to be some relatively clear connection between their assigned tasks and their end goal.

This is, as I’ve said before, part of the academic honesty pitch I do in my intermediate quantum mechanics course (which I’ll be teaching again in September). There are maybe a dozen problems in QM you can fully solve with pencil and paper, and there are innumerable places on the Internet where you can find them worked out in detail. But that’s bringing a forklift to the gym. This is a junior level majors course, and if you care about the major, you need to learn the content, and the only way to do that is to do the actual work, not Google the solution, or ask an LLM to work it out for you.

This is, admittedly, a harder sell in a service course (either a course that’s required for a different major or a Gen Ed course), but I don’t think there’s any way around that. Oppressive surveillance can make it harder, and provide a channel for punishing transgressors, but I don’t think those are a great use of anyone’s time and resources. In the end it all comes back to needing students to care about what they’re doing, and understand how the tasks they’re set advance that interest. This is something that I think we’ve collectively been doing a lousy job with for a long time now, and sorting it out is going to be a slow and painful process.

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As is often the case, I feel like I’ve said most of this before, probably multiple times, but here it is in a slightly different package. If you’d like to see how it gets repackaged next time, here’s a button:

And if you feel so moved, the comments will be open:

1. I find Yglesias weirdly fascinating, as he tends to produce Takes that often seem to be engaging with something real in ways that I find sensible (or at least congenial), but he nearly always includes a couple of small elements that are just Wrong in ways that suck all the attention away from whatever valid points he’s making.

2. For example, some places have seen a percentage increase in the number of entering students expressing interest in “humanities” majors, which would be a reversal of long-term trends. But it also might simply reflect a large reduction in the number of international students coming to the US, who tend to major in STEM subjects at higher rates than domestic students.

3. There’s a strong “Reasons I’m Glad I’m Not a Social Scientist” element to a lot of this, because it’s not hard to come up with plausible ways that people might’ve been interpreting the questions that aren’t what was intended.

4. Or driving trains, which is also cool.

5. A notion that won’t necessarily long survive sitting through a faculty meeting…

6. SteelyKid recently turned 17. God, I’m old.