Universities: Good or bad for a nation?

More people are arguing that students should attend trade schools instead of a university — some even say we shouldn't have universities at all.

Ever more often, I hear people arguing against higher education.

What—?!

A friend in an email group went on record a few months ago saying he would rather see American students go to trade schools and work in factories, rather than go to college and build a business. He maintained this position even after I added the condition that the factory would be Chinese owned. Yes, he said, he would rather see Americans as laborers for a Chinese company, than see Americans be the owners of those companies.

This threw me for something of a loop, because I was unable to see any logic in that. So I did some reading. And some more reading. If you’re interested this, I’d recommend thumbing through these:

• Trade School vs. College vs. The Military: Pick One While Building Passive Income by Joshua King (2024)

• Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus (2010)

• The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule within America's Universities by Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn (2023)

These books all come at it from different perspectives, but here are the arguments favoring trade school over universities boiled down, at least according to my takeaway from these books and a lot of web articles:

• Trade schools are cheaper and you can get to work sooner, compared to the high debt load and delay of getting into a career that comes with a college education.

• Anyone can get into a trade school, no matter how disadvantaged your background; and they can be on a level playing field with everyone else.

• There will always be demand for trade jobs, schools often help with job placement, these jobs tend to feature pretty good security and stability.

All true, and are both practical and excellent reasons to learn a trade. But these are not arguments against other students pursuing a university degree. Those arguments, which I invariably heard alongside pro-trade arguments, are more ideological than practical:

• All universities do is indoctrinate students into a rigid and conformist worldview of “political correctness” that’s out of touch with regular people.

• Universities are comprised of exclusive clubs of privileged elitists — they will only admit their own kind anyway.

• But most of all, both of the above are seen as unpatriotic threats to traditional American family values.

In fact, if you can forgive my next little leap of logic: More than anything, this debate felt to me like a religious war. The Christians see the educated elitists as corrupt atheist degenerates who threaten all that they stand for. It’s about protecting the American way of life.

I found the pro-trade school arguments to be perfectly valid, and if someone wants to go that way, terrific. We will definitely always need tradespeople.

Conversely, I found the anti-university arguments flat-out wrong. I’ll qualify that with yes, there is some elitism and exclusivity and political correctness at most universities (as there is at nearly every company and institution on the planet). But it’s hardly the main thing about them. These ideological objections sound to me like coming from someone who never went there.

I also find anti-university sentiment to be harmful. Absolutely harmful, harmful mostly to the very same people making those arguments! What drives economic growth, lower national debt, lower crime rates, more competitive technology, better healthcare, higher tax revenue and reduced need for public assistance like welfare?

Having more college graduates.

The societal benefits of having a more educated population, with more college graduates, are myriad — and these benefit everyone. I’ve put together a list here (apparently I like lists) of many of these benefits. Without these, you can have all the blue collar factory jobs you want, but your American Pie country is going to fall farther and farther behind the world, quality of living will take a dive, and eventually your whole income tax is going to be paying for a welfare state: