Good article, Roger, but I think what you really have are THREE higher education systems that you’re confounding. The hard sciences have one kind of problem. The humanities have another, very different, problem. Finally, the social sciences are in the middle– with some disciplines humanities in all but name and subject to their problems, and others doing quite well.

For an undergraduate in the physical sciences, especially engineering, there is a bright future ahead once they graduate. Even the inflated tuitions (and even considering that their prospects aren’t quite so bright as their teachers lead them to believe), they can expect to be well-prepared members of their profession with good job prospects and useful skills. Or they can stay for a masters and, depending on the discipline, do even better. It’s at the doctoral level that scientists and engineers have poor career prospects: 5 years to a doctorate, then 7 years or more in post-doc purgatory, followed by (sometimes) a tenure track position. A rational person would not get a PhD in a hard science in America.

In the humanities, the picture is reversed. Four years to get an undergraduate in pop culture (ie majoring in being entertained) or (insert grievance group) studies, and then… what, exactly? It’s a microcosm of the liberal program: the masses babied and coddled by government programs, suited only for indoctrination and as warm bodies at rallies; and a chosen elite to call all the shots and reap all the rewards. Even the elite come out from a PhD program parroting their elders and trained in sophistry– but where’s all those critical thinking skills they blather on about? Even most humanities professors are virtually innumerate (incapable of even basic mathematics), and are more suited to jargon than logic. Instead they compete on rhetoric and their own academic pedigree. Except for the very few who make a PhD, the only career prospects in these fields are the ones who jump ship and get their graduate degrees in something else, or take jobs that didn’t require a college degree in the first place.

In between are the social sciences professors. Some fields, like political science, anthropology and (for universities that consider them a social science) grievance group studies, are humanities in all but name, at least at the undergraduate level. As with the humanities, the best someone can do short of a professorship is to either become an activist or to leave the field entirely.

The rest of the social sciences, though, are doing just fine. The business school students are gaining good practical, mathematical and analytical skills that they’re likely to use in paying jobs. The same goes for economics students. (Psychology not so much at the undergraduate level.) For grad school students, an MBA or masters in economics or social work prepare you for genuine career opportunities. If you get your doctorate, there are plenty of positions in academia and in the business world eager to recruit you.

So we really have several inter-related higher education systems, each with their own problems. There’s the administrative bloat at colleges, dumbing down of education in the humanities, campus as a primarily activist institution, and lack of job prospects for hard-science PhD’s. These each have their own solutions.