When students arrive in college, they encounter a vague sense of freedom. What they often do not realize is how controlled their campus experience is. Universities operate as a closed economy: centrally administered, collectively resourced, carefully controlled by administrators who hope their plans aid retention efforts.
Over the past several decades, the college campus has morphed into a comprehensive residential and lifestyle provider. Beginning in the 1990s, when colleges started competing more aggressively for larger enrollment numbers, investing in student life became a way to recruit students. Expanded student unions, more-comfortable residence halls, larger recreation centers, campus programming offices and improved dining choices became the norm.
By the early 2000s, colleges faced an “amenities arms race.” Rec centers were revamped with climbing walls and lazy rivers; dorms gave way to apartment lofts with expansive lounges; campus coffee bars were established with national brands.
The upgrading of amenities wasn’t only a matter of physical adjustments. Administrators, aware that nonacademic factors can influence educational outcomes, sought to provide full-scale support not only to ensure graduation (tutoring and writing centers) but also personal growth (wellness and DEI programming). Specialized administrative units and support services grew quickly, outpacing academic departments. Critics have argued that this growing array of services contributes to rising college costs and an emphasis on comforts and conveniences rather than educational value.
This transformation has been especially pronounced at America’s wealthiest and most selective colleges and universities. At elite institutions, students enter a nearly self-contained community. They ride campus buses without paying a fare. They enter expansive recreation centers without a membership card. They attend concerts, meet career coaches, reserve study rooms, download software, join student organizations, and participate in countless campus activities without ever reaching for a wallet.
None of these services are free. Their costs are embedded in tuition and fees, endowment income, donor support and government funding. Yet, because students rarely confront a price at the point of use, they experience consumption without consequence or even comparison.
This autumn, when the student-athletes who compose the University of Michigan’s football team are girding their loins in preparation for Armageddon, a.k.a. the Ohio State game, suppose some freshman players make mistakes in practice. They miss blocking assignments, fumble handoffs, run the wrong pass routes.
Do we think Michigan’s coaches will respond therapeutically? If they emulate the university’s administration, the coaches will soothe their freshmen by saying:
Golly, to err is human, to forgive is to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.” It is unfolding even among individuals who will not line up across the line of scrimmage from Ohio State’s stress-inducing student-athletes. As your coaches, our priority is to allow you freshmen to “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys.” So, we will not respond to your mistakes with extrinsic motivations — e.g., criticism. We coaches are here to help you transition to academia. Thrashing OSU would be fun, but first and foremost we are “investing in students’ well-being and growth by fostering a culture of connection and collaboration — rather than competition.”
Granted, the quoted words do not sound like coach-speak from those responsible for filling the Big House, the nation’s largest stadium (capacity 109,901). The words sound like what they are, an emanation of today’s academic mind.
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The rhetorical goo celebrating “connection” and “collaboration,” and disparaging “competition” (an implicit reproach of “capitalist culture”?), has a practical as well as ideological function. A pass/fail first semester will partially obscure an embarrassing aspect of today’s “college for all” culture: the proliferation of remedial classes for students whose high school “experience” left them ill-prepared academically.
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Is it not possible that Michigan’s postulated “mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals” is a self-fulfilling diagnosis? Tell young people that their professors presume them to be crisis-afflicted, and young people might conform to authority figures’ expectations.
And if “intrinsic motivations” are sufficient for learning, and are, as Michigan implies, somehow superior to dictated motivations, such as grades, supplied by professors, the university itself seems almost superfluous. Other than as an excuse for the football team.
Phil Magness, on his Facebook page, shares this bit about our economically clueless VP:
Old clip I found of JD Vance at the start of his Senate career.
He wants to end the US dollar’s position as a global reserve currency, because he thinks it allows Americans to consume too much and do so too cheaply.
Keep that in mind the next time you order a $20 burrito on door dash.
The justices have repudiated the president on key issues in his second term including tariffs, birthright citizenship, Federal Reserve independence and National Guard deployments. If Trump got to pick four additional justices, he might have won all those cases.
GMU Econ alum Dave Hebert reveals the real economic lesson of the rust belt. Here’s his conclusion:
Left to their own devices, markets tend to produce diversity. No single industry dominates indefinitely, and rational actors spread their bets rather than concentrating them. Detroit’s monoculture did not emerge from markets. It was constructed through politics. Union contracts that locked in labor rigidities, tariffs, and voluntary export restraints insulated incumbents from competition, and government subsidies favored existing industries rather than enabling new ones. Every act of protection deepened the monoculture and narrowed the viable alternatives within the community. The first-best prescription remains the same: let markets work.
Prices, not politics, are better suited to directing capital and labor toward their most productive uses. But the second-best prescription, that takes seriously the political realities that policymakers face, is equally clear: policymakers should avoid concentrating support on a single industry. Economic resilience comes from economic diversification.
