On Elite Over-production and Student Anxiety

The Murphy Institute at Tulane University lists me as a “2025-2026 Visiting Faculty Fellow, Center for Ethics” on their website (here). I want to thank my family, my Amsterdam colleagues, and the folks at Tulane for making this privilege possible.

One of the great joys of being a gainfully employed academic at a university is that one is surrounded by relatively young people on a daily basis. One is, thereby, exposed to all kinds of new attitudes and often all kinds of new ideas. One more surprising feature of teaching in one’s hometown is educating and being educated by the children of one’s long-standing friends and acquaintances (as well as professional colleagues).

In addition, at the University of Amsterdam I teach students from all over Europe (and even the world). With borders closing everywhere, I recognize how lucky I am in my student population. We offer degrees in Dutch and English, and we are a relatively low-cost and reasonably well-organized option for what I like to call the upwardly mobile middle classes of Europe.

One of the new attitudes that has greatly alarmed and even shocked me is that students increasingly seem to believe that one mishap will harm them for life. This is especially notable among the exchange students from the US, who are not used to the inflation-free grading scheme we use in Holland [flunking a student is totally ordinary here],* but it is becoming more widespread generally. The idea that life is full of possible second chances seems alien to many of my students. The downsides to this attitude are pretty obvious: a reduced willingness to take chances; and more general level of anxiety (not to mention the massive upswing in rather serious psychiatric diagnoses over the last decade).

The attitude, and risk-aversion, is especially odd to encounter in my Dutch students because, first, it doesn’t fit the more general skeptical attitude toward meritocracy among the Dutch intelligentsia of my generation. Second, and more important, the local job market, also for university graduates, has been very tight here for literally decades on end. But as, in other things, the attitudes in the imperial center flow outward into the periphery, even if they don’t do full justice to the local context (yet).

A generation ago, when I was a high school student, students got tracked in Dutch high schools; but within the track excellence was not expected or encouraged. (This is known as a zesjes-cultuur. A zes (six out of ten) being the low pass.)) Formally, I flunked ninth and tenth grade in high school, and I was allowed to pass only provisionally (with extra work during the Summer). Yes, there are some folk who knew me back then who are surprised (and even suspicious) that I am a professor now.

When I first started to notice this feature — that one can’t afford mishaps — in my students, I assumed it was a side effect of the internet. This has indeed reduced the possibility to make fresh starts. But the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has made this less challenging. In addition, one’s grades are private.

The argument of Peter Turchin’s (2023) End Times would treat the attitude as side effect of elite over-production. As he puts it, “today an advanced degree is not a perfect, or even reasonably effective, defense against precarity.” (p. 90) In fact, quoting Guy Standing, “degree holders” can be se seen as “one of the precariat factions.” (p. 90 This matters quite a bit to Turchin’s general argument that “the credentialed precariat…(the frustrated elite aspirant class) is the most dangerous class for societal stability.” (p. 91.)

Turchin usefully suggests that the anxiety children feel is handed down by parents who fear that their children will be left behind. (p. 94) And he usefully connects it to the college bribery scandal. He then observes:

The basic dynamic here is completely generic to what happens to aspirant games as they progress to their late stages. Unlike its milder versions, extreme competition does not lead to the selection of the best candidates, the candidates most suited for the positions. Rather, it corrodes the rules of the game, the social norms and institutions that govern how society works in a functional way. It destroys cooperation. (p. 94)

If elite over-production, or its perception, is the underlying cause of the general attitude shift among our students, then carefully down-sizing student numbers at universities at a national level is not wholly irrational. Reducing the number of would-be-elites may be a solution to a collective action problem. Putting it like this ignores the many intrinsic reasons why a college degree would be worth obtaining. It also ignores how in the transition, destroying higher education actually reduces the employment opportunities for credentialed classes, and undermines the dynamism and growth of local economies linked to college campuses.

So, even if it were desirable to reduce elite production in college degrees, it doesn’t follow that the way the US is going about the downsizing of its university sector is the right way to achieve it. (I hasten to add the policy changes toward higher education also doesn’t seem motivated by concern over elite over-production.) Reducing foreign student visas does nothing to reduce the domestic over-production of elites, while dramatically weakening the finances of the higher education sector and so undermining quality of education and (potentially) spots for remaining students. A down-ward spiral in the finances of higher education might result in a reduction of elite production while making the obtaining of spots on campus even more competitive.

Reducing science/research funding does reduce some production of domestic elites, but at the expense of scientific, engineering, and medical innovation (and presumably underlying future productivity). In fact, Turchin’s own argument focuses on law students (since folk with law degrees end up over-represented in politics and revolutionary movements). His data helps explain, in fact, the tendency among once prestigious lawyers of bending the knee to Trump—their fallback is tumbling off a very steep peak. (I suspect government funding for law schools is already relatively negligible Stateside.)

In yesterday’s post (here), I suggested that Turchin’s underlying argument is not about elite over-production at all. What he is really after is characterizing the conditions of elite cohesion or elite defection. In fact, elite over-production is just a useful proxy for other things going wrong: lack of opportunity in the wider economy, that is, declining marginal or even absolute returns. In these contexts, intra-elite defection may pay dividends to the courageous (or already despairing), especially because, as we have noted, fear is reducing appetite for risk-taking among other would-be elites.

In fact, elite levels are not always a good proxy for social and political health. For, alongside the reduction of higher education, one can reduce total numbers of elites by closing borders to goods and people and thereby accelerate economic decline. In Turchin’s jargon, elite production numbers will be in equilibrium after a period of downward adjustment. But at the expense of general stagnation, and misery, that is a world with no actual second chances at all.

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*Since our teaching staff is increasingly trained in academic environments where pervasive grade-inflation is common this should become less normal over time.