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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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18 Jun, 6 tweets, 2 min read
The College Apocalypse is real.
Here are the numbers from 2020

Undergrad enrollment isn't bouncing back yet

npr.org/2021/06/10/100…
In fact, overall enrollment (including grad students) has been drifting slowly but steadily downward since 2012. Here's a chart of the last 5 years. For-profit colleges got slaughtered but every type of college has seen drops.

nscresearchcenter.org/current-term-e…
So really the current enrollment drop is just a continuation or acceleration of an existing trend. And that trend was always going to lead to a shakeout in the higher ed sector. Covid just provided the push.

I'll have a post out about this soon...
Basically, for-profits are dead, liberal arts colleges are in huge trouble, community colleges will need a big permanent federal bailout (especially if we make them free!), four-year public universities will cut cotsts but ultimately be OK, and the Ivy League (🙄) will be fine.

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
17 Jun
This is pretty scary.

foreignaffairs.com/articles/china…
I mean, we can argue back and forth all day about whether the U.S. would go to war with China if all China did was invade Taiwan.

But it's 100% certain that if China launched preemptive strikes on U.S. military forces, we WOULD go to war.
I mean, if China preemptively attacks American forces, it's not even about Taiwan anymore. Taiwan is then a sideshow. At that point it's World War 3.
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
16 Jun
1/Here's a post I wrote about how worker power might spark a productivity boom!

noahpinion.substack.com/p/a-virtuous-c…
2/COVID has forced a lot of businesses to use the internet to increase productivity in ways they had resisted before.
3/And as the great @erikbryn has noted, productivity is rising!

technologyreview.com/2021/06/10/102…
Read 17 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
16 Jun
America is a highly stratified class society, with class consciousness present in almost everything we do. But because our racial and ethnic divisions are more pressing, we don't even really get a chance to think about class stratification.
Living in a less class-stratified society feels like having a great weight taken off your back, that you never knew was there. It's impossible to describe how different America is to people to have only ever lived in America.
It's not as simple as saying "there are places where top college grads will marry construction workers, and private equity people will invite fry cooks to their dinner parties". Because that doesn't tell you *why* they do that, or how they think about it.
Read 7 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
15 Jun
1/I wrote this post the other day, but I didn't do a thread about it. Let's remedy that.

Americans are thinking very zero-sum these days. It's a big problem for our nation.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/americas-sca…
2/I've been reading about the 70s, when high gas prices and inflation (not matched by wage increases) created real scarcity for Americans. They turned to the selfish, every-man-for-himself attitude of the 80s.

I worry that something similar is happening now...
3/Have you ever heard of "self-expression values" vs. "survival values"? It's one way political scientists measure attitudes in different countries. And over the last 10 years, America has shifted dramatically toward the "survival" end of the scale.
Read 16 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
14 Jun
10% of graffiti looks really good, and 90% looks bad. We need some sort of voting or rating system for graffiti artists so that we can get some quality control around here.
Actually, I have a friend who was a graffiti artist in Japan, then got arrested for illegally painting on stuff. It made him famous, and now his wall art is in high demand at trendy Tokyo shops.
OK I'm thinking about how to implement this. How about:

1. Graffiti artists spray-paint unique personal QR codes that let passers-by send tokens to a crypto wallet

2. If you get enough tokens, the city hires you to do graffiti on officially reserved walls
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
13 Jun
It's interesting how the tankies and assorted other Cold Warriors have become incredibly strong on Twitter, but they've so far failed to gain any real political influence. Even Ilhan Omar doesn't even slightly buy into their bullshit.
On Twitter you'll get ratioed to hell and back for saying the U.S. helped the Soviets beat the Nazis (which is obviously true).

In real life, the Representative who's thought to be the most leftist on foreign policy is denouncing China over the Uyghur repression. ImageImage
The tankies are the purest illustration of how Twitter lets a few bad actors look like the voice of the public, and of how limited and ineffectual that apparent influence is beyond the confines of this website.
Read 4 tweets

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