The Four Horsemen of the university
Financial, political, ideological and technological challenges threaten one of the oldest institutions in continuous operation
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Previously on Our Long Walk:
‘We can avoid our seemingly inevitable descent into more economic misery’: My interview with André de Ruyter
The Age of Sinistrality: As economies evolve to reward creativity, so will left-handers’ value increase.
Universities are some of the oldest institutions in continuous operation. Not only have they survived wars, pandemics, financial crises, and periods of intense political upheaval, but they have outlived almost all other organisational forms; as Steven Levitt points out in a recent podcast, while none of the top ten US companies in 1900 were still on top in 2000, almost all of the top ten US universities remain within the top twenty a century later. That suggests remarkable persistence.
Yet universities cannot afford to rest on their laurels. Several new threats have emerged during the last few years that challenge their traditional model. The Four Horsemen – finance, politics, ideology, and technology – are advancing ominously, casting long shadows over the future of the university.
I will argue, too, that these threats are not unique to the developed world. In fact, the Four Horseman gallop even more rapidly in the developing world. South African universities are particularly hard-hit by these challenges, grappling with severe financial constraints, complex political dynamics, damaging ideological shifts, and technological resistance, all of which are reshaping the educational landscape at an unprecedented pace. Only a proactive approach, I will argue, can save them.
Probably the most widely recognised challenge facing universities is financial. This is not a new one. How to finance an elite institution is a challenge as old as the institutions themselves; with limited tuition revenue, medieval universities often depended on inconsistent church and state funding. In the eighteenth century, professors like Adam Smith at the University of Glasgow were paid directly by his students rather than receiving a fixed salary from the institution. Later, many universities in places like California, Australia and South Africa relied on the proceeds of 19th-century gold rushes, as Caitlin Harvey shows in a new Past & Present paper.1
Today, university funding models vary enormously across the globe. In the US, less than 40% of total tertiary education expenditure comes from public sources; in Scandinavian countries, the share is above 90%.2 A consequence of the low share of state spending in the US is increasing student debt. One study finds that across all degree programme levels, a higher percentage of students borrowed for graduate education and borrowed a higher mean amount.3 Outstanding student loan debt in the US now exceeds $1.5 trillion.
Yet having students pay for university is not necessarily bad. A 2023 AER paper finds that making loans more accessible through higher student loan limits increases borrowing among poor students, with evidence that such students are able to reduce time spent on paid work as well as their reliance on credit cards.4 Those who borrow more also study more: They are, on average, more likely to (re)enroll, more likely to graduate, and have higher earnings in subsequent years as much as ten years after they initially began borrowing. Additional student loans also lead to, if anything, better financial positions along other key indicators over the same horizon. Increased borrowing reduces student loan delinquency and default, a finding that appears counterintuitive even if we exclude the effects on human capital accumulation and earnings.
For South African students, the sad reality is that access to student funding, whether through grants or loans, is declining. This year, South African universities will face significant budget cuts, affecting their capacity to meet the high demand for education and exacerbating existing challenges in student accommodation and funding. These cuts, projected to reach R5.5 billion, will severely reduce National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) and university subsidies, reducing the number of students funded and escalating university debt issues.
South African universities will be forced to cut expenses, too, but it will not be easy. That is partly the consequence of political decisions within and outside the university. Internally, universities have become bloated. Between 1976 and 2018, administrative and professional jobs at US universities have increased by 452% compared to only 92% for full-time faculty.5 Another study reports that the top 50 US schools have 1 faculty member for every 11 students but 1 non-faculty employee for every 4 students, a ratio of three to one. I suspect South African universities follow a similar trend.
What do all these administrators do?
Often, not much. In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, the late David Graeber argues that certain jobs exist primarily to make people feel that everyone is equally trapped in meaningless work.6 A less depressing explanation might simply be Parkinson’s Law. In 1955, C. Northcote Parkinson made a humorous yet insightful analysis of bureaucratic inefficiency. Parkinson’s central argument is that work expands to fill the time available for its completion, leading to unnecessary growth in organisational size, particularly in public administration. He introduced the idea that officials multiply subordinates, not rivals, and that they create work for each other, resulting in a bloated bureaucracy. Economists might instead refer to the classic principal-agent problem: those in management (the agents) may create jobs or tasks to justify their own positions or to appear more productive, without necessarily considering the actual value or necessity of these roles from the perspective of the organisation, the state or, ultimately, the taxpayer (the principal).
It is not only internal politics that contribute to bloat. The South African government’s rigid labour market regulations aimed at safeguarding employment make it almost impossible for universities to reduce administrative costs or restructure their workforce, even in the face of financial strain. Worse, it not only impedes efficiency but also obstructs the pursuit of excellence: just try to appoint a brilliant foreign scholar at a South African university today.
Political support for affirmative action, known in South Africa as black economic empowerment (BEE) policies, which are efforts to address the inequities of colonialism and apartheid, adds an additional layer of complexity to the goals of universities. In my experience, it can also create perverse incentives that often do more harm than good: a student incentivised to continue her studies in South Africa when she should go abroad, young faculty members hired with high expectations (often of themselves) that can be challenging to meet.
Although affirmative action policies date from the early 2000s, they found ideological support in the increasing popularity of critical theory, with subfields such as critical race theory, queer theory, and postcolonial critique permeating the humanities and social sciences. Critical theory, despite its initial value in challenging orthodoxy by emphasising that science – our search for truth – is never entirely objective, had the opposite effect to that originally intended, as I explain in a previous post:
Rather than promoting a diversity of thought and critical reflection, one of its early strengths, critical theory and the movements it has engendered, is criticised for fostering division within and beyond university campuses by emphasising identity-based differences over commonalities and, in some cases, limiting free speech by creating an atmosphere where certain viewpoints are less welcome.
While there is some pushback in the US against the pervasiveness of critical theory, this is not yet the case in South Africa. In fact, given South Africa’s history of racial discrimination and the frustration with the slow progress in the thirty years of democracy, some universities have elected to invest more resources into critical theory, be it in the form of compulsory courses, new hires or ‘diversity’ training programmes for faculty and students.
This is despite no empirical evidence that these courses or programmes, however well-intentioned they might be, make for a more equitable society.7 (They might, in fact, have detrimental outcomes – and further bloat university administrations and budgets.) And, most importantly, there is even less evidence that these ideas are in demand in the job market: do banks, hospitals, or engineering firms want their latest recruits to have a working knowledge of critical theory? Put differently: would you want your retirement fund strategy, coronary artery bypass graft, or flight from Joburg to Cape Town to be performed by someone with an A in critical theory?
Technology is the fourth Horseman and undoubtedly the most serious. Universities, from the best to the rest, are unprepared for the avalanche of technological innovation in the coming years, if not months. The speed at which artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT have progressed is remarkable. Such tools, as Ethan Mollick explains, can already displace many tasks of the university professor and administrator. AI enables the creation of customised learning modules and practice problems tailored to individual student performance, enhancing personalised learning experiences. It can automate administrative tasks like scheduling and email responses, reducing professors’ workload in these areas and allowing more focus on teaching and research. It can keep course content up-to-date by analysing current research and trends, ensuring the curriculum’s relevance and currency. It can assist in lecture preparation by providing the latest relevant resources and creating engaging multimedia content, making lectures more dynamic and efficient to prepare. And, yes, ChatGPT can summarise the literature, suggest new research directions, and draft papers, allowing professors to focus on deeper analysis.
Yet, ask university administrators about this, and they are largely ignorant. No, a committee on whether ChatGPT is ‘plagiarism’ is not sufficient to deal with the looming revolution. And, sure, education is not just about imparting knowledge but also about fostering human values, ethical reasoning, emotional intelligence, and interpersonal skills. That sounds wonderful until a good undergraduate student with a laptop and some creativity produces a better research paper than most university professors. Here’s Mollick in a recent post:
In the 10 months since, the evidence for AI as a productivity booster has only grown, but many people are still not even trying to use AI (though that isn’t true for all populations – almost 100% of my students this semester reported using LLMs).
That must surely overturn the applecart of professors at South African universities being paid for the quantity of their research output. Here’s a prediction: within a year or two, we will see the rise of a new class of superproductive professors producing 100 or more papers a year, all with the help of AI. Make no mistake: these papers will be largely meaningless, making little if any contribution to science. But because several universities in South Africa pay their researchers up to R50,000 ($2500) for every paper, they will make these professors millionaires – and further speed up the collapse of an already fragile financial system.
The happy news is that AI is also the solution to the Four Horsemen. Tutors? Use an AI bot. Translators? Just use heygen. Language editors? Grammarly or Curie. It is not just these service tasks that are open to disruption. Soon, Co-Pilot will do your coding for you, Tableau will visualise your data, and Consensus will help you find relevant research papers, saving you time and money. ChatGPT is the best research assistant money can buy, with the fortunate coincidence that it will improve exponentially.
To save themselves, universities must learn to become leaner and meaner by trimming those jobs where AI is a viable, even if not yet perfect, substitute. Appoint the best researchers, South African or not, who want to do locally relevant research. Keep critical theory in those courses where it makes sense, but don’t let it permeate the entire university structure, turning academic institutions into ivory towers detached from the real world of problem-solving and progress towards a better future. And stop paying researchers for their research; to reward them, rather promote the impactful ones (those that publish in high-quality journals) to higher salary brackets.
The Four Horsemen are at the doorstep. Will universities respond fast enough?
An edited version of this post appeared (in Afrikaans) in Rapport on 12 February 2024. The image was created using Midjourney v6.
Harvey, C., 2023. Gold Rushes, Universities and Globalization, 1840–1910. Past & Present, p.gtac042.
Jongbloed, B. and Vossensteyn, H., 2016. University funding and student funding: International comparisons. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 32(4), pp.576-595.
Webber, K.L. and Burns, R., 2021. Increases in graduate student debt in the US: 2000 to 2016. Research in Higher Education, 62, pp.709-732.
Black, S.E., Denning, J.T., Dettling, L.J., Goodman, S. and Turner, L.J., 2023. Taking it to the limit: Effects of increased student loan availability on attainment, earnings, and financial well-being. American Economic Review, 113(12), pp.3357-3400.
Delucchi, M., Dadzie, R.B., Dean, E. and Pham, X., 2021. What’s that smell? Bullshit jobs in higher education. Review of Social Economy, pp.1-22.
Graeber, D., 2019. Bullshit jobs: The rise of pointless work, and what we can do about it.
Paluck, E.L., Porat, R., Clark, C.S. and Green, D.P., 2021. Prejudice reduction: Progress and challenges. Annual review of psychology, 72, pp.533-560; Devine, P.G. and Ash, T.L., 2022. Diversity training goals, limitations, and promise: A review of the multidisciplinary literature. Annual review of psychology, 73, pp.403-429.
I found the fourth horseman- technology- to be particularly interesting. Anecdotally there has been widespread pushback against the use of AI tools throughout my academic experience at Stellenbosch University thus far. However, I believe that the use AI tools in the workplace to be inevitable. Therefore there should be an effort made to integrate such tools within university courses. The failure to implement tools of the fourth industrial revolution may lead to students being ill-prepared for the workforce where advanced computational software is bound to be utilized.
I was just reminded of your article when reading a developer report (on software engineering and the industry). The one highlight there is again that university (and college) doesn't prepare people for the workplace. Can we think about that more? Often these questions get asked (and statements made) as if it's a valid question (what I mean is that the question is biased, not that one shouldn't question with justification).
I loved going to university. Was it perfect? No. Will I do it again? Yes. Would I have studied for longer or would I study something again in future (assuming I may retire or just step out of the commercial environment)? Yes. I value knowledge. I value understanding. I love building things.
Will having a degree make you successful (for some definition of successful)? No, and one shouldn't get stuck on only academic qualifications. The world needs more than that. Sidenote: I wish in South Africa we can again develop trades. We either have people at the top of the pyramid (those that can afford to study or endure with big loans to do so, or those with the resources to have started something), or the unemployed. There's so much opportunity in between. My point is thus not to punt universities over everything else. It's rather that it seems to me the universities and degrees are getting dismissed more often than not. Are there degrees that are near useless from a commercial perspective? Useless is perhaps a strong term, but there are definitely less useful qualifications from that perspective.
I feel like the argument (question) should be changed or perhaps even invalidated (harsh, yes): Universities don't prepare you for the work environment. They're academic institutions. They're not technical colleges/technicons – and they each fulfil a purpose to this day. A sound academic foundation can do wonders in many ways. I never expected to walk out of university prepared for the work environment. That's why I did internships – a great privilege that helped me a lot. Capitalism (or should I say consumerism) is killing yet another advancement of the human race. Knowledge just for the sake of knowledge should be limited, because it is true that we live in a world where pragmatism is vital. We need to save ourselves on this planet, etc. It is a deep understanding of what's going on plus the practical application of solutions that will save us.
I'm annoyed by this movement to invalidate universities.