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J. Whitebread

Feb 27 • 41 tweets • 10 min read

Papers graded, midterm posted, sourdough baked. You know what that means? It's time for another episode of "What's going on at BYU?" Part 3!

Okay so this one gets pretty deep. Honestly, if this thread were an anime it would be titled: "What if a small Utah religious school turned into Mormon Yale?" So let's go.

Okay first, check out this graph and really try to grok what it means.

Now let me give you the breakdown. In 1950 fewer than 1 in 10 18-24 year olds went to college. In 1970 that jumped to 1 in 6, by the 90s, 1-3. This trend continued until the crash of 2008.

Basically, in the second half of the 20th C. America decided that the best way to reach middle class prosperity and respectability was to get a college degree.

Now whether this was a GOOD idea or not, well Mike Rowe has been debating that for years, but it happened, and it made colleges boom, tuitions soared, Admin bloated and lots of fancy bldgs with rich alum's names on them got built.

Now the recent downward trend is suggesting that the glory days of the higher ed boom are over, (and boy do I have stories to tell about that!) but for the moment let's concentrate on BYU and how it handled this huge change.

Now this trend hit LDS as well, only worse because of a simultaneous growth in the church by both births and conversions.

There are 4k institutions of higher learning in America, but only a handful of church schools and only one BYU. There were more than enough schools to absorb this wave of college students, but for the church it was just impossible.

In the 70s BYU could more or less accommodate every qualified kid who wanted to go to college, by the 90s that was impossible.

So by the mid 80s It was clear that BYU could do one of two things. 1. Build 10 more BYUs (At the time the church couldn't afford it) or 2. Dramatically raise academic standard at BYU, turning BYU into a more more elite institution. Well we know what happened.

I want to point out, this wasn't a conscious choice, it was pretty much inevitable given the demographics. There really was no choice for BYU.

AND I want to add that the church and BYU really did throw ALL the spaghetti at ALL the walls to try and mitigate this.

They started the Perpetual Education Fund, they expanded distance learning, made their own learning management software when Blackboard was in its infancy, restructured Ricks into BYUI and made it more or less open enrollment...

They expanded and strengthened CES and institute so that kids at other colleges could get a strong spiritual experience like BYU, and they fiddled endlessly with admission standards and formula to get a better socioeconomic mix at BYU, etc. etc. etc. BUT...

At the end of the day if you raise admission standards, you are going to create a more elite institution by default and that brings two big problems:
1. Elitism.
2. Staffing.
We'll get to staffing but let's concentrate on elitism first.

Okay so first, elitism isn't all bad, it has pros and cons, let's talk about the pros first.

First, having a premiere tier one research institution associated with the church had to be a huge feather in the cap for the church and everyone involved. More grants, more prestige, more positive press, etc.

Think about what the BYU football team does for the church and its positive image, now imagine that, except now imagine you're a nerd.

And now all the other nerds in all the other fields instead of thinking you are just some religious school on the level of a state ag school start accepting you, networking with, etc. It's actually a VERY big deal.

Being a top tier institution had to be a tempting goal for the church. And, it had a lot of other benefits. In addition, instead of exporting your best and brightest off to the Ivy Leagues, they could come here.

And you could turn the institution into a leadership machine. (#Groomedforleadership? lol) and I'm dead serious. Using BYU as a farm for the best and the brightest who would then turn into the future leaders of the church had to be a major plus.

So there were a lot of reasons to be positive about BYU becoming an elite private school. It would expand the mission of the church, elevate it's position, help it to make friends out in the larger academic world, and considering it was inevitable any way, why not?

But there were also a lot of cons, and let's go over those now.

I don't know if you've ever been to a cocktail party at an academic conference but trust me, you will figure out who went to Harvard and who didn't in about 15 min. First, all the Harvard grads will TELL you and second, the will all gather cliquishly to one side and exclude you.

I wish I could tell you that academia wasn't just some snobbier version of mean girls with PhDs but...yeah I'd be lying. Educational elitism is the worst.

I chose to go to a cheaper school to get my PhD and it more or less meant I got cut off from huge avenues in my career, and I knew it, but heck, I was poor at the time but hey I'm not drowning in 200k in debt either. Bottom line, credentials and academic pedigree matter.

I can't say it simpler than this. Rich people don't send their kids to college to get ag degrees. They just don't. Then send them to get the power degrees, law, medicine, engineering, or at least the intellectually respectable ones, like literature or Philosophy.

And rich kids have advantages that poor kids don't. ACT tutors, prep schools, mentoring programs, private schools. If you skew your admissions to higher standards, try as you might, you are going to hoover up a bunch of rich kids and rich kids have rich tastes.

Now again, I know they fiddled with the admissions standards endlessly to try and avoid this. For example, they gave people who lived further away from BYU more points in their admission, BUT...

For every poor rural kid they picked up from somewhere in the world, they picked up a rich kid from the DC beltway or West Chester NY and this is something I don't think we really understood at the time, Mormons are all farmers anymore, we have bank.

We aren't all pioneer farmers anymore. There are large enclaves of wealthy LDS, particularly back east, in finance, in gov't etc. and rich people have rich cultural tastes and that includes ideologies.

And I think this is something no one expected. Used to be that if you had a kid of a banker or businessmen you could expect him to skew conservative, because those classes were conservative. But that ain't true anymore...

Look at the educated suburbs, they used to be WASPY country club republicans, but not anymore, they are more likely to be left-leaning today. This trend happened exactly at the same time that BYU was becoming more elite.

So there's no conspiracy here and no real obvious incompetence or negligence either. I just think everyone underestimated just how much skewing to higher academic standards would impact the demo at BYU

And you can tell the difference. When I went to BYU, I dormed with guys who were animal science majors and construction tech majors. Neither of those programs really exist at BYU anymore. BYU got rid of their cows and the Creamery suffered.

When I taught at BYU about 10 years ago, it was a completely different crowd. Night and day difference. It wasn't kids who could trace their roots back to a dirt famer in one generation. It was a group of kids who were very elite.

And a very different kind of elite than the one that existed say 30 yrs ago. A much more urban and urbane elite with much more conventionally liberal views.

Again, I say this knowing that they almost certainly didn't intend or expect this, and even did a ton to mitigate it. I just think they didn't realize how dramatic of a shift this would be.

But as dramatic as a shift in the student body and their values, I think the more dramatic shift was in the faculty, which brings me to the second problem, STAFFING. But I am going to start another thread for that one.