It’s no secret that higher education is broken. A steady stream of books confirms everyone’s suspicions about the troubling rise of the “neoliberal” “corporate” university, the “devaluation” of the humanities, the “stealth plan for America,” why Johnny still can’t read, and how liberal professors are destroying young people’s minds.

Recent years have seen a serious improvement in this genre, first with Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education (Princeton University Press, 2018) and then Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind (Penguin Books, 2018). Now, the incredibly prolific Georgetown political philosopher Jason Brennan has teamed up with the equally prolific economic historian Phil Magness to explore a surprisingly under-researched area: the business ethics of higher education. Or more accurately, the lack thereof.

They offer 11 tightly argued chapters of about 25 or 30 pages each. The prose is clear and they do a very good job specifying what evidence would be sufficient to convince them that (for example) student evaluations are valid indicators of teaching quality. They conclude that a lot of the usual stories about what is ailing higher education—neoliberalism, corporatization, etc.—are basically ghost stories about “gremlins” or “poltergeists”—appeals to effectively supernatural explanations. These phenomena have a more mundane explanation: higher education is a moral mess because the incentives in higher education are a mess.

Public choice in education / In arguing this, they draw from James M. Buchanan and Nicholas Devotoglu’s 1970 book Academia in Anarchy (Basic Books), written during Buchanan’s brief stop at UCLA. Buchanan and Devotoglu point out an oddity in the structure of higher education: the consumers don’t pay, the producers aren’t accountable to their customers, and the payers don’t consume. It’s a prescription for anarchy, according to Buchanan and Devotoglu—or a moral mess, according to Brennan and Magness.

The authors clearly and self-consciously follow the public choice tradition of “politics without romance,” using the tools of public choice theory (rational choice, behavioral symmetry, methodological individualism) to develop an explanation of academia without romance. Rather than being communities of disinterested truth-seekers as in the intellectual ideal, universities are like any large bureaucratic organization. They are filled with empire-builders, schemers, and Machiavellian maneuverers seeking to acquire resources for themselves, their departments, and the causes they find important.

In this respect I think Brennan and Magness (and probably the rest of the public choice tradition generally) could strengthen their argument. A lot of academics will be turned off by their assertion that in many cases “moral language disguises self-interest.” Surely, the offended reader says, this describes those scoundrels over in the business school but it doesn’t describe me. The reader puts the book down, never to pick it up again, and perhaps to tweet about Brennan and Magness’s crazy conspiracy theory. And perhaps the reader will think that even if there are cases where self-interest is a problem, it has an easy enough fix: turn the power over to those who are not self-interested. Simple.

Brennan and Magness can offer a stronger argument to this, though: Their conclusions follow even if academic actors aren’t self-interested. I’ve devoted myself to what I consider the most important work there is: the study of economics. Assume I’ve done so out of absolutely no material interest whatsoever and out of truly altruistic intentions. Still, I’m faced with the problem of scarcity: I need food, shelter, and other goods to do this work. That means I must be “self-interested” in the weakest of senses. Public choice still works even if we keep the altruistic romance in politics and academia.

Imagined improvement / The moral mess, Brennan and Magness argue, is a result of pathological incentives in higher education. Shortly after they identify stories you might read in the Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed about effectively supernatural forces taking over campuses, they explain that the “treatment effects” of higher ed is not what a lot of people think. Hence, they argue that “most academic advertising is immoral bull—.”

They distinguish between the selection effects and the treatment effects of higher education. Evidence suggests that smart kids go to college (selection effect), rather than that college makes kids smarter (treatment effect). A lot of colleges’ claims about transformative experiences are simply not grounded in convincing evidence. There are stories and a lot of wishful thinking, but the best and most systematic evidence about the treatment effect of schooling shows that people don’t acquire the skills and dispositions we want them to have by going to school per se. Academic advertising about the value of higher education is, therefore, immoral not because it is purposely deceptive, but because it is negligent: schools make claims about transformative experiences that aren’t evidence-based. The advertisers and recruiters might believe in their hearts that State U really changes people and are acting out of the best of motives. However, they are basing this conviction not on careful evaluation but on a combination of anecdotes and wishful thinking.

This leads to the heart of the book. A lot of public policy is made not on the basis of the world as it actually is, but on the basis of the worlds we can imagine. Higher education policy is no different and advocates for greater subsidies usually build their cases on sandy aspirational foundations of what we imagine higher education is and can be. One of the best examples of this is the common curricular mistake that a lot of institutions make: asserting that students should know something and then concluding the students will learn that thing if they are forced to take a course in it. Students should know how to write, so they should be required to take composition courses. Students should be numerate, so they should be required to take math classes. Students should understand the economic way thinking, so they should be required to take economics classes. Knowing a second language and being familiar with other cultures is advantageous, so students should be required to take two semesters of a foreign language.

It does not follow, however, that people will be more knowledgeable about a subject if they are required to take coursework in it. The treatment effect of courses is pretty dismal. The Collegiate Learning Assessment featured in Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s book Academically Adrift (University of Chicago Press, 2011) shows that students don’t really improve their writing skills in composition courses. Brennan and Magness don’t discuss this, but the economist and leader in economic education, Robert Frank, author of The Economic Naturalist (Perseus Books, 2007), has argued that the treatment effect of a traditional introductory course on economic understanding is effectively zero. When we are making curriculum decisions, we should be doing so in light of these realities and not in light of what we can imagine.

Reform? / To the extent that there are solutions to this moral mess, we would do well to look carefully at the incentives at play in higher education and ask about the costs and benefits of rigorous evaluation of student learning. Brennan and Magness devote a chapter to student evaluations and another chapter to grades, arguing in both cases that the mathematical averaging that gives us composite teaching evaluations and grade point averages is largely arbitrary and not terribly informative.

The problem, they point out, is that more rigorous and informative evaluation is very costly and no one really has an incentive to do it. This conclusion appears again in their chapter on cheating. It is easy, they argue, to cut way down on cheating by giving many low-stakes assessments rather than just one or two big tests. This, however, is costly for the faculty member and rarely rewarded. It is far easier, they note, to give and grade one or two very large assignments than to give and grade many smaller assignments when, ultimately, the money and prestige professors desire result from research they could be conducting in the time they are devoting to teaching and assessment.

Conclusion / Throughout, the book offers a useful mix of ethical reasoning and hard-headed empirical analysis. It presents important correctives to some of the popular-but-wrong stories that make regular appearances in the higher ed press. The academy, for example, is not being “adjunctified”; if anything, the tenure-track footprints of the supposedly-most-beleaguered humanities disciplines are growing on campus. There hasn’t been a “neoliberal” turn in higher education administration. Faculties have moved politically leftward and, if anything, a lot of administrators running student development programs and assorted student service offices are even further left than the faculty. And so on. If higher education is going to develop a respectable ethos, we need to dispense with some of the popular-but-wrong stories people tell.

If I were to summarize the entire book in a single sentence, it would be, “People respond to incentives, even in the academy.” In a lot of cases, we can peek behind grand rhetoric and find naked self-interest underlying curricular proposals, the development of the general education requirements, and the continued persistence and proliferation of doctoral programs that should probably be shuttered. Importantly, Brennan and Magness’s explanation works if we interpret “self-interest” in the broadest sense to include sincere altruism and say that educational altruists are just trying to do what they think is best in a world of scarce resources and differences of opinion as to what makes for a flourishing life. We will see conflicts between an altruist-filled English department and an altruist-filled economics department as long as resources are scarce and each department sincerely believes that the marginal dollar spent on its program has a higher social benefit than the next-best alternative.

Cracks in the Ivory Tower is an important contribution that, if we are lucky, will make those of us in higher education do some serious ethical reckoning. If nothing else, the taxpayers who are subsidizing our lifestyles deserve it.