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What none of these parents understand is that their children’s and teens’ destructive obsession with technology is the predictable consequence of a virtually unrecognized merger between the tech industry and psychology.

Dr. B.J. Fogg, is a psychologist and the father of persuasive technology, a discipline in which digital machines and apps — including smartphones, social media, and video games — are configured to alter human thoughts and behaviors. As the lab’s website boldly proclaims: “Machines designed to change humans.”

These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit.

psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.

This alliance pairs the consumer tech industry’s immense wealth with the most sophisticated psychological research, making it possible to develop social media, video games, and phones with drug-like power to seduce young users.

Likewise, social media companies use persuasive design to prey on the age-appropriate desire for preteen and teen kids, especially girls, to be socially successful. This drive is built into our DNA, since real-world relational skills have fostered human evolution.

Called “the millionaire maker,” Fogg has groomed former students who have used his methods to develop technologies that now consume kids’ lives. As he recently touted on his personal website, “My students often do groundbreaking projects, and they continue having impact in the real world after they leave Stanford… For example, Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people. The co-founder was a student of mine.”

Persuasive technology (also called persuasive design) works by deliberately creating digital environments that users feel fulfill their basic human drives — to be social or obtain goals — better than real-world alternatives.

Kids spend countless hours in social media and video game environments in pursuit of likes, “friends,” game points, and levels — because it’s stimulating, they believe that this makes them happy and successful, and they find it easier than doing the difficult but developmentally important activities of childhood.

While persuasion techniques work well on adults, they are particularly effective at influencing the still-maturing child and teen brain.

“Video games, better than anything else in our culture, deliver rewards to people, especially teenage boys,” says Fogg. “Teenage boys are wired to seek competency. To master our world and get better at stuff. Video games, in dishing out rewards, can convey to people that their competency is growing, you can get better at something second by second.”

it’s persuasive design that’s helped convince this generation of boys they are gaining “competency” by spending countless hours on game sites, when the sad reality is they are locked away in their rooms gaming, ignoring school, and not developing the real-world competencies that colleges and employers demand.

Persuasive technologies work because of their apparent triggering of the release of dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter involved in reward, attention, and addiction.

As she says, “If you don’t get 100 ‘likes,’ you make other people share it so you get 100…. Or else you just get upset. Everyone wants to get the most ‘likes.’ It’s like a popularity contest.”

there are costs to Casey’s phone obsession, noting that the “girl’s phone, be it Facebook, Instagram or iMessage, is constantly pulling her away from her homework, sleep, or conversations with her family.

Casey says she wishes she could put her phone down. But she can’t. “I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just… because,” she says. “It’s not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life.”

B.J. Fogg may not be a household name, but Fortune Magazine calls him a “New Guru You Should Know,” and his research is driving a worldwide legion of user experience (UX) designers who utilize and expand upon his models of persuasive design.

“No one has perhaps been as influential on the current generation of user experience (UX) designers as Stanford researcher B.J. Fogg.”

the core of UX research is about using psychology to take advantage of our human vulnerabilities.

As Fogg is quoted in Kosner’s Forbes article, “Facebook, Twitter, Google, you name it, these companies have been using computers to influence our behavior.” However, the driving force behind behavior change isn’t computers. “The missing link isn’t the technology, it’s psychology,” says Fogg.

UX researchers not only follow Fogg’s design model, but also his apparent tendency to overlook the broader implications of persuasive design. They focus on the task at hand, building digital machines and apps that better demand users’ attention, compel users to return again and again, and grow businesses’ bottom line.

the “Fogg Behavior Model” is a well-tested method to change behavior and, in its simplified form, involves three primary factors: motivation, ability, and triggers.

“We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do, and the machines can do that autonomously.”

Regarding ability, Fogg suggests that digital products should be made so that users don’t have to “think hard.” Hence, social networks are designed for ease of use

Finally, Fogg says that potential users need to be triggered to use a site. This is accomplished by a myriad of digital tricks, including the sending of incessant notifications

moral questions about the impact of turning persuasive techniques on children and teens are not being asked. For example, should the fear of social rejection be used to compel kids to compulsively use social media? Is it okay to lure kids away from school tasks that demand a strong mental effort so they can spend their lives on social networks or playing video games that don’t make them think much at all?

Describing how his formula is effective at getting people to use a social network, the psychologist says in an academic paper that a key motivator is users’ desire for “social acceptance,” although he says an even more powerful motivator is the desire “to avoid being socially rejected.”

the startup Dopamine Labs boasts about its use of persuasive techniques to increase profits: “Connect your app to our Persuasive AI [Artificial Intelligence] and lift your engagement and revenue up to 30% by giving your users our perfect bursts of dopamine,” and “A burst of Dopamine doesn’t just feel good: it’s proven to re-wire user behavior and habits.”

Ramsay Brown, the founder of Dopamine Labs, says in a KQED Science article, “We have now developed a rigorous technology of the human mind, and that is both exciting and terrifying. We have the ability to twiddle some knobs in a machine learning dashboard we build, and around the world hundreds of thousands of people are going to quietly change their behavior in ways that, unbeknownst to them, feel second-nature but are really by design.”

Programmers call this “brain hacking,” as it compels users to spend more time on sites even though they mistakenly believe it’s strictly due to their own conscious choices.

Banks of computers employ AI to “learn” which of a countless number of persuasive design elements will keep users hooked

A persuasion profile of a particular user’s unique vulnerabilities is developed in real time and exploited to keep users on the site and make them return again and again for longer periods of time. This drives up profits for consumer internet companies whose revenue is based on how much their products are used.

“The leaders of Internet companies face an interesting, if also morally questionable, imperative: either they hijack neuroscience to gain market share and make large profits, or they let competitors do that and run away with the market.”

Social media and video game companies believe they are compelled to use persuasive technology in the arms race for attention, profits, and survival.

Children’s well-being is not part of the decision calculus.

one breakthrough occurred in 2017 when Facebook documents were leaked to The Australian. The internal report crafted by Facebook executives showed the social network boasting to advertisers that by monitoring posts, interactions, and photos in real time, the network is able to track when teens feel “insecure,” “worthless,” “stressed,” “useless” and a “failure.”

The report also bragged about Facebook’s ability to micro-target ads down to “moments when young people need a confidence boost.”

These design techniques provide tech corporations a window into kids’ hearts and minds to measure their particular vulnerabilities, which can then be used to control their behavior as consumers. This isn’t some strange future… this is now.

The official tech industry line is that persuasive technologies are used to make products more engaging and enjoyable. But the revelations of industry insiders can reveal darker motives.

Revealing the hard science behind persuasive technology, Hopson says, “This is not to say that players are the same as rats, but that there are general rules of learning which apply equally to both.”

After penning the paper, Hopson was hired by Microsoft, where he helped lead the development of the Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming system

“If game designers are going to pull a person away from every other voluntary social activity or hobby or pastime, they’re going to have to engage that person at a very deep level in every possible way they can.”

This is the dominant effect of persuasive design today: building video games and social media products so compelling that they pull users away from the real world to spend their lives in for-profit domains.

Persuasive technologies are reshaping childhood, luring kids away from family and schoolwork to spend more and more of their lives sitting before screens and phones.

“Since we’ve figured to some extent how these pieces of the brain that handle addiction are working, people have figured out how to juice them further and how to bake that information into apps.”

Today, persuasive design is likely distracting adults from driving safely, productive work, and engaging with their own children — all matters which need urgent attention

Still, because the child and adolescent brain is more easily controlled than the adult mind, the use of persuasive design is having a much more hurtful impact on kids.

But to engage in a pursuit at the expense of important real-world activities is a core element of addiction.

younger U.S. children now spend 5 ½ hours each day with entertainment technologies, including video games, social media, and online videos.

Even more, the average teen now spends an incredible 8 hours each day playing with screens and phones

U.S. kids only spend 16 minutes each day using the computer at home for school.

Quietly, using screens and phones for entertainment has become the dominant activity of childhood.

Younger kids spend more time engaging with entertainment screens than they do in school

teens spend even more time playing with screens and phones than they do sleeping

kids are so taken with their phones and other devices that they have turned their backs to the world around them.

many children are missing out on real-life engagement with family and school — the two cornerstones of childhood that lead them to grow up happy and successful

persuasive technologies are pulling kids into often toxic digital environments

A too frequent experience for many is being cyberbullied, which increases their risk of skipping school and considering suicide.

And there is growing recognition of the negative impact of FOMO, or the fear of missing out, as kids spend their social media lives watching a parade of peers who look to be having a great time without them, feeding their feelings of loneliness and being less than.

The combined effects of the displacement of vital childhood activities and exposure to unhealthy online environments is wrecking a generation.

as the typical age when kids get their first smartphone has fallen to 10, it’s no surprise to see serious psychiatric problems — once the domain of teens — now enveloping young kids

Self-inflicted injuries, such as cutting, that are serious enough to require treatment in an emergency room, have increased dramatically in 10- to 14-year-old girls, up 19% per year since 2009.

While girls are pulled onto smartphones and social media, boys are more likely to be seduced into the world of video gaming, often at the expense of a focus on school

it’s no surprise to see this generation of boys struggling to make it to college: a full 57% of college admissions are granted to young women compared with only 43% to young men.

Economists working with the National Bureau of Economic Research recently demonstrated how many young U.S. men are choosing to play video games rather than join the workforce.

The destructive forces of psychology deployed by the tech industry are making a greater impact on kids than the positive uses of psychology by mental health providers and child advocates. Put plainly, the science of psychology is hurting kids more than helping them.

Hope for this wired generation has seemed dim until recently, when a surprising group has come forward to criticize the tech industry’s use of psychological manipulation: tech executives

Tristan Harris, formerly a design ethicist at Google, has led the way by unmasking the industry’s use of persuasive design. Interviewed in The Economist’s 1843 magazine, he says, “The job of these companies is to hook people, and they do that by hijacking our psychological vulnerabilities.”

Marc Benioff, CEO of the cloud computing company Salesforce, is one of the voices calling for the regulation of social media companies because of their potential to addict children. He says that just as the cigarette industry has been regulated, so too should social media companies. “I think that, for sure, technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and that product designers are working to make those products more addictive, and we need to rein that back as much as possible,”

“If there’s an unfair advantage or things that are out there that are not understood by parents, then the government’s got to come forward and illuminate that.”

Since millions of parents, for example the parents of my patient Kelly, have absolutely no idea that devices are used to hijack their children’s minds and lives, regulation of such practices is the right thing to do.

Another improbable group to speak out on behalf of children is tech investors.

How has the consumer tech industry responded to these calls for change? By going even lower.

Facebook recently launched Messenger Kids, a social media app that will reach kids as young as five years old. Suggestive that harmful persuasive design is now honing in on very young children is the declaration of Messenger Kids Art Director, Shiu Pei Luu, “We want to help foster communication [on Facebook] and make that the most exciting thing you want to be doing.”

the American Psychological Association (APA) — which is tasked with protecting children and families from harmful psychological practices — has been essentially silent on the matter

APA Ethical Standards require the profession to make efforts to correct the “misuse” of the work of psychologists, which would include the application of B.J. Fogg’s persuasive technologies to influence children against their best interests

Manipulating children for profit without their own or parents’ consent, and driving kids to spend more time on devices that contribute to emotional and academic problems is the embodiment of unethical psychological practice.

“Never before in history have basically 50 mostly men, mostly 20–35, mostly white engineer designer types within 50 miles of where we are right now [Silicon Valley], had control of what a billion people think and do.”

Some may argue that it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect their children from tech industry deception. However, parents have no idea of the powerful forces aligned against them, nor do they know how technologies are developed with drug-like effects to capture kids’ minds

Others will claim that nothing should be done because the intention behind persuasive design is to build better products, not manipulate kids

similar circumstances exist in the cigarette industry, as tobacco companies have as their intention profiting from the sale of their product, not hurting children. Nonetheless, because cigarettes and persuasive design predictably harm children, actions should be taken to protect kids from their effects.

in a 1998 academic paper, Fogg describes what should happen if things go wrong, saying, if persuasive technologies are “deemed harmful or questionable in some regard, a researcher should then either take social action or advocate that others do so.”

I suggest turning to President John F. Kennedy’s prescient guidance: He said that technology “has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man.”

The APA should begin by demanding that the tech industry’s behavioral manipulation techniques be brought out of the shadows and exposed to the light of public awareness

Changes should be made in the APA’s Ethics Code to specifically prevent psychologists from manipulating children using digital machines, especially if such influence is known to pose risks to their well-being.

Moreover, the APA should follow its Ethical Standards by making strong efforts to correct the misuse of psychological persuasion by the tech industry and by user experience designers outside the field of psychology.

It should join with tech executives who are demanding that persuasive design in kids’ tech products be regulated

The APA also should make its powerful voice heard amongst the growing chorus calling out tech companies that intentionally exploit children’s vulnerabilities.

When viewed with the Inflation Reduction Act, which the House is poised to pass later this week, and last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law, a major shift in congressional climate spending comes into focus. According to the RMI analysis, these three laws are set to more than triple the federal government’s average annual spending on climate and clean energy this decade, compared with the 2010s.

Within a few years, when the funding has fully ramped up, the government will spend roughly $80 billion a year on accelerating the development and deployment of zero-carbon energy and preparing for the impacts of climate change. That exceeds the GDP of about 120 of the 192 countries that have signed the Paris Agreement on Climate Change

By the end of the decade, the federal government will have spent more than $521 billion

the bill’s programs focus on the bleeding edge of the decarbonization problem, investing money in technology that should lower emissions in the 2030s and beyond.

The International Energy Association has estimated that almost half of global emissions reductions by 2050 will come from technologies that exist only as prototypes or demonstration projects today.

To get those technologies ready in time, we need to deploy those new ideas as fast as we can, then rapidly get them to commercial scale, Carey said. “What used to take two decades now needs to take six to 10 years.” That’s what the CHIPS Act is supposed to do

The law, for instance, establishes a new $20 billion Directorate for Technology, which will specialize in pushing new technologies from the prototype stage into the mass market. It is meant to prevent what happened with the solar industry—where America invented a new technology, only to lose out on commercializing it—from happening again

Congress has explicitly tasked the new office with studying “natural and anthropogenic disaster prevention or mitigation” as well as “advanced energy and industrial efficiency technologies,” including next-generation nuclear reactors.

The bill also directs about $12 billion in new research, development, and demonstration funding to the Department of Energy, according to RMI’s estimate. That includes doubling the budget for ARPA-E, the department’s advanced-energy-projects skunk works.

it allocates billions to upgrade facilities at the government’s in-house defense and energy research institutes, including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and Berkeley Lab, which conducts environmental-science research.

RMI’s estimate of the climate spending in the CHIPS bill should be understood as just that: an estimate. The bill text rarely specifies how much of its new funding should go to climate issues.

When you add CHIPS, the IRA, and the infrastructure law together, Washington appears to be unifying behind a new industrial policy, focused not only on semiconductors and defense technology but clean energy

The three bills combine to form a “a coordinated, strategic policy for accelerating the transition to the technologies that are going to define the 21st century,”

scholars and experts have speculated about whether industrial policy—the intentional use of law to nurture and grow certain industries—might make a comeback to help fight climate change. Industrial policy was central to some of the Green New Deal’s original pitch, and it has helped China develop a commanding lead in the global solar industry.

“Industrial policy,” he said, “is back.”

they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it.

What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests.

“Our criticisms are founded in a confidence in science,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and a proponent of open science. “That’s a fundamental difference — we’re critiquing science to make it better. Others are critiquing it to devalue the approach itself.”

alls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer.

The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions.

Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.”

While insisting that they merely wanted to ensure that public policy was based on sound science, tobacco companies defined the term in a way that ensured that no science could ever be sound enough. The only sound science was certain science, which is an impossible standard to achieve.

“Doubt is our product,” wrote one employee of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in a 1969 internal memo. The note went on to say that doubt “is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” and “establishing a controversy.” These strategies for undermining inconvenient science were so effective that they’ve served as a sort of playbook for industry interests ever since

Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowing something; it’s a lack of comprehension deliberately created by agents who don’t want you to know,

In the hands of doubt-makers, transparency becomes a rhetorical move. “It’s really difficult as a scientist or policy maker to make a stand against transparency and openness, because well, who would be against it?

But at the same time, “you can couch everything in the language of transparency and it becomes a powerful weapon.” For instance, when the EPA was preparing to set new limits on particulate pollution in the 1990s, industry groups pushed back against the research and demanded access to primary data (including records that researchers had promised participants would remain confidential) and a reanalysis of the evidence. Their calls succeeded and a new analysis was performed. The reanalysis essentially confirmed the original conclusions, but the process of conducting it delayed the implementation of regulations and cost researchers time and money.

Delay is a time-tested strategy. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has,” said Marc Morano, a prominent critic of global warming research

which has received funding from the oil and gas industry. “We’re the negative force. We’re just trying to stop stuff.”

these ploys are getting a fresh boost from Congress. The Data Quality Act (also known as the Information Quality Act) was reportedly written by an industry lobbyist and quietly passed as part of an appropriations bill in 2000. The rule mandates that federal agencies ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” that they disseminate, though it does little to define what these terms mean. The law also provides a mechanism for citizens and groups to challenge information that they deem inaccurate, including science that they disagree with. “It was passed in this very quiet way with no explicit debate about it — that should tell you a lot about the real goals,” Levy said.

in the 20 months following its implementation, the act was repeatedly used by industry groups to push back against proposed regulations and bog down the decision-making process. Instead of deploying transparency as a fundamental principle that applies to all science, these interests have used transparency as a weapon to attack very particular findings that they would like to eradicate.

Now Congress is considering another way to legislate how science is used. The Honest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,3The bill has been passed by the House but still awaits a vote in the Senate. is another example of what Levy calls a “Trojan horse” law that uses the language of transparency as a cover to achieve other political goals. Smith’s legislation would severely limit the kind of evidence the EPA could use for decision-making. Only studies whose raw data and computer codes were publicly available would be allowed for consideration.

It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’

ost scientific controversies aren’t about science at all, and once the sides are drawn, more data is unlikely to bring opponents into agreement.

objective knowledge is not enough to resolve environmental controversies. “While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently. “As long as we continue down this unabashedly naive road about what science is, and what it is capable of doing, we will continue to fail to reach any sort of meaningful consensus on these matters,”

The dispute over tobacco was never about the science of cigarettes’ link to cancer. It was about whether companies have the right to sell dangerous products and, if so, what obligations they have to the consumers who purchased them.

Similarly, the debate over climate change isn’t about whether our planet is heating, but about how much responsibility each country and person bears for stopping it

While researching her book “Merchants of Doubt,” science historian Naomi Oreskes found that some of the same people who were defending the tobacco industry as scientific experts were also receiving industry money to deny the role of human activity in global warming. What these issues had in common, she realized, was that they all involved the need for government action. “None of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government,”

These controversies are really about values, not scientific facts, and acknowledging that would allow us to have more truthful and productive debates. What would that look like in practice? Instead of cherry-picking evidence to support a particular view (and insisting that the science points to a desired action), the various sides could lay out the values they are using to assess the evidence.

For instance, in Europe, many decisions are guided by the precautionary principle — a system that values caution in the face of uncertainty and says that when the risks are unclear, it should be up to industries to show that their products and processes are not harmful, rather than requiring the government to prove that they are harmful before they can be regulated. By contrast, U.S. agencies tend to wait for strong evidence of harm before issuing regulations

the difference between them comes down to priorities: Is it better to exercise caution at the risk of burdening companies and perhaps the economy, or is it more important to avoid potential economic downsides even if it means that sometimes a harmful product or industrial process goes unregulated?

But science can’t tell us how risky is too risky to allow products like cigarettes or potentially harmful pesticides to be sold — those are value judgements that only humans can make.

What the rise of the BRICs symbolizes to both panicked individuals in the West and optimistic ones elsewhere is a radical shift in the geography of power -- a catch-up or reversal of the Western global dominance that was established with the Industrial Revolution.

developing countries won't be able to follow the West's path to becoming rich, because that path required certain things that were largely particular to that one period in history.

The challenge ahead for the BRICs, then, is to figure out how to maintain growth in a world where the vast new frontier opened up by the Industrial Revolution appears to be closing. The BRICs can play the West's game better than the West, both through technological innovation and population growth, but only for so long. The whole world has to figure out a way of dealing with energy and agriculture.

each industry, as it (mostly) legally can, designs products that are difficult to resist and sometimes addictive.

The issues of auto and gun safety, of drug, alcohol and tobacco addiction, and of hyperconsumption of unhealthy food are not as distinct as we’ve long believed; really, they’re quite similar. For example, the argument for protecting people against marketers of junk food relies in part on the fact that antismoking regulations and seatbelt laws were initially attacked as robbing us of choice; now we know they’re lifesavers.

Until now (and, sadly, perhaps well into the future), corporations have been both more nimble and more flush with cash than the public health arms of government

“What we need,” Freudenberg said to me, “is to return to the public sector the right to set health policy and to limit corporations’ freedom to profit at the expense of public health.”

The turning point in the tobacco wars was when the question changed from the industry’s — “Do people have the right to smoke?” — to that of public health: “Do people have the right to breathe clean air?” Note that both questions are legitimate, but if you address the first (to which the answer is of course “yes”) without asking the second (to which the answer is of course also “yes”) you miss an opportunity to convert the answer from one that leads to greater industry profits to one that has literally cut smoking rates in half.

Similarly, we need to be asking not “Do junk food companies have the right to market to children?” but “Do children have the right to a healthy diet?”

The question is not only, “Do we have a right to bear arms?” but also “Do we have the right to be safe in our streets and schools?”

n short, says Freudenberg: “The right to be healthy trumps the right of corporations to promote choices that lead to premature death and preventable illnesses. Protecting public health is a fundamental government responsibility

“Shouldn’t science and technology be used to improve human well-being, not to advance business goals that harm health?” Two other questions that can be answered “yes.”

It is clear that these products are designed to be maximally addictive, in order to harvest as much of our attention as they can. Tech humanists say this business model is both unhealthy and inhumane – that it damages our psychological well-being and conditions us to behave in ways that diminish our humanity

The main solution that they propose is better design. By redesigning technology to be less addictive and less manipulative, they believe we can make it healthier – we can realign technology with our humanity and build products that don’t “hijack” our minds.

its most prominent spokesman is executive director Tristan Harris, a former “design ethicist” at Google who has been hailed by the Atlantic magazine as “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”. Harris has spent years trying to persuade the industry of the dangers of tech addiction.

In February, Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, launched a related initiative: the Tech and Society Solutions Lab, which aims to “maximise the tech industry’s contributions to a healthy society”.

the tech humanists are making a bid to become tech’s loyal opposition. They are using their insider credentials to promote a particular diagnosis of where tech went wrong and of how to get it back on track

The real reason tech humanism matters is because some of the most powerful people in the industry are starting to speak its idiom. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has warned about social media’s role in encouraging “mindless scrambles for friends or unworthy distractions”,

In short, the effort to humanise computing produced the very situation that the tech humanists now consider dehumanising: a wilderness of screens where digital devices chase every last instant of our attention.

After years of ignoring their critics, industry leaders are finally acknowledging that problems exist. Tech humanists deserve credit for drawing attention to one of those problems – the manipulative design decisions made by Silicon Valley.

these decisions are only symptoms of a larger issue: the fact that the digital infrastructures that increasingly shape our personal, social and civic lives are owned and controlled by a few billionaires

Because it ignores the question of power, the tech-humanist diagnosis is incomplete – and could even help the industry evade meaningful reform

Taken up by leaders such as Zuckerberg, tech humanism is likely to result in only superficial changes

they will not address the origin of that anger. If anything, they will make Silicon Valley even more powerful.

To the litany of problems caused by “technology that extracts attention and erodes society”, the text asserts that “humane design is the solution”. Drawing on the rhetoric of the “design thinking” philosophy that has long suffused Silicon Valley, the website explains that humane design “starts by understanding our most vulnerable human instincts so we can design compassionately”

this language is not foreign to Silicon Valley. On the contrary, “humanising” technology has long been its central ambition and the source of its power. It was precisely by developing a “humanised” form of computing that entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs brought computing into millions of users’ everyday lives

Facebook had a new priority: maximising “time well spent” on the platform, rather than total time spent. By “time well spent”, Zuckerberg means time spent interacting with “friends” rather than businesses, brands or media sources. He said the News Feed algorithm was already prioritising these “more meaningful” activities.

Tech humanists say they want to align humanity and technology. But this project is based on a deep misunderstanding of the relationship between humanity and technology: namely, the fantasy that these two entities could ever exist in separation.

They believe we can use better design to make technology serve human nature rather than exploit and corrupt it. But this idea is drawn from the same tradition that created the world that tech humanists believe is distracting and damaging us.

The story of our species began when we began to make tools

All of which is to say: humanity and technology are not only entangled, they constantly change together.

This is not just a metaphor. Recent research suggests that the human hand evolved to manipulate the stone tools that our ancestors used

The ways our bodies and brains change in conjunction with the tools we make have long inspired anxieties that “we” are losing some essential qualities

Yet as we lose certain capacities, we gain new ones.

The nature of human nature is that it changes. It can not, therefore, serve as a stable basis for evaluating the impact of technology

Yet the assumption that it doesn’t change serves a useful purpose. Treating human nature as something static, pure and essential elevates the speaker into a position of power. Claiming to tell us who we are, they tell us how we should be.

Messaging, for instance, is considered the strongest signal. It’s reasonable to assume that you’re closer to somebody you exchange messages with than somebody whose post you once liked.

Harris and his fellow tech humanists also frequently invoke the language of public health. The Center for Humane Technology’s Roger McNamee has gone so far as to call public health “the root of the whole thing”, and Harris has compared using Snapchat to smoking cigarettes

The public-health framing casts the tech humanists in a paternalistic role. Resolving a public health crisis requires public health expertise. It also precludes the possibility of democratic debate. You don’t put the question of how to treat a disease up for a vote – you call a doctor.

They also remain confined to the personal level, aiming to redesign how the individual user interacts with technology rather than tackling the industry’s structural failures. Tech humanism fails to address the root cause of the tech backlash: the fact that a small handful of corporations own our digital lives and strip-mine them for profit.

This is a fundamentally political and collective issue. But by framing the problem in terms of health and humanity, and the solution in terms of design, the tech humanists personalise and depoliticise it.

Far from challenging Silicon Valley, tech humanism offers Silicon Valley a useful way to pacify public concerns without surrendering any of its enormous wealth and power.

these principles could make Facebook even more profitable and powerful, by opening up new business opportunities. That seems to be exactly what Facebook has planned.

reported that total time spent on the platform had dropped by around 5%, or about 50m hours per day. But, Zuckerberg said, this was by design: in particular, it was in response to tweaks to the News Feed that prioritised “meaningful” interactions with “friends” rather than consuming “public content” like video and news. This would ensure that “Facebook isn’t just fun, but also good for people’s well-being”

Zuckerberg said he expected those changes would continue to decrease total time spent – but “the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable”. This may describe what users find valuable – but it also refers to what Facebook finds valuable

not all data is created equal. One of the most valuable sources of data to Facebook is used to inform a metric called “coefficient”. This measures the strength of a connection between two users – Zuckerberg once called it “an index for each relationship”

Facebook records every interaction you have with another user – from liking a friend’s post or viewing their profile, to sending them a message. These activities provide Facebook with a sense of how close you are to another person, and different activities are weighted differently.

Holding humanity and technology separate clears the way for a small group of humans to determine the proper alignment between them

Why is coefficient so valuable? Because Facebook uses it to create a Facebook they think you will like: it guides algorithmic decisions about what content you see and the order in which you see it. It also helps improve ad targeting, by showing you ads for things liked by friends with whom you often interact

emphasising time well spent means creating a Facebook that prioritises data-rich personal interactions that Facebook can use to make a more engaging platform.

“time well spent” means Facebook can monetise more efficiently. It can prioritise the intensity of data extraction over its extensiveness. This is a wise business move, disguised as a concession to critics

industrialists had to find ways to make the time of the worker more valuable – to extract more money from each moment rather than adding more moments. They did this by making industrial production more efficient: developing new technologies and techniques that squeezed more value out of the worker and stretched that value further than ever before.

there is another way of thinking about how to live with technology – one that is both truer to the history of our species and useful for building a more democratic future. This tradition does not address “humanity” in the abstract, but as distinct human beings, whose capacities are shaped by the tools they use.

It sees us as hybrids of animal and machine – as “cyborgs”, to quote the biologist and philosopher of science Donna Haraway.

The cyborg way of thinking, by contrast, tells us that our species is essentially technological. We change as we change our tools, and our tools change us. But even though our continuous co-evolution with our machines is inevitable, the way it unfolds is not. Rather, it is determined by who owns and runs those machines. It is a question of power

The various scandals that have stoked the tech backlash all share a single source. Surveillance, fake news and the miserable working conditions in Amazon’s warehouses are profitable. If they were not, they would not exist. They are symptoms of a profound democratic deficit inflicted by a system that prioritises the wealth of the few over the needs and desires of the many.

If being technological is a feature of being human, then the power to shape how we live with technology should be a fundamental human right

The decisions that most affect our technological lives are far too important to be left to Mark Zuckerberg, rich investors or a handful of “humane designers”. They should be made by everyone, together.

Rather than trying to humanise technology, then, we should be trying to democratise it. We should be demanding that society as a whole gets to decide how we live with technology

What does this mean in practice? First, it requires limiting and eroding Silicon Valley’s power.

Antitrust laws and tax policy offer useful ways to claw back the fortunes Big Tech has built on common resources

democratic governments should be making rules about how those firms are allowed to behave – rules that restrict how they can collect and use our personal data, for instance, like the General Data Protection Regulation

This means developing publicly and co-operatively owned alternatives that empower workers, users and citizens to determine how they are run.

we might demand that tech firms pay for the privilege of extracting our data, so that we can collectively benefit from a resource we collectively create.

The bureau’s powers became clear during the Trump administration, which wielded its authority aggressively, though somewhat erratically, using the agency to curb exports of advanced technology goods like semiconductors to the telecommunications company Huawei and other Chinese businesses.

The Biden administration is still carrying out a review of its China policies and has not indicated how it plans to use the bureau’s powers.

“China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system — all the rules, values, and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to,”

That includes how to use the Commerce Department’s powers, including whether to block more exports of American technology, whether to keep or scrap Mr. Trump’s tariffs on foreign metals, and how to set the standards for national security reviews of foreign investments.

They have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not going to happen on my watch because the United States are going to continue to grow and expand.”

Congress updated its laws governing export controls, giving the Bureau of Industry and Security more power to determine what kind of emerging technologies cannot be shared with China and other geopolitical rivals.

It’s that these guys have been trained for 30 years to think that exports are good for America and that’s that,” Mr. Scissors said. “So surprise, they don’t want tighter export controls.”

“The sense of urgency in recent years inclined our leadership to make decisions without reference to what industry thought,

the Biden administration is considering candidates to lead the Bureau of Industry and Security.

Mr. Wolf, who was previously assistant secretary at the bureau, issued the sanctions against ZTE. He has consistently argued that restrictions that are unclear and unpredictable can backfire, “harming the very interests they were designed to protect.”

The administration may also be considering less prominent candidates for the bureau’s three Senate-confirmed posts,

Whoever leads the bureau, officials at the National Security Council are likely to play a guiding role, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

Her core discovery, made with a co-author, Erik M. Conway, was twofold. They reported that dubious tactics had been used over decades to cast doubt on scientific findings relating to subjects like acid rain, the ozone shield, tobacco smoke and climate change. And most surprisingly, in each case, the tactics were employed by the same group of people.

The central players were serious scientists who had major career triumphs during the Cold War, but in subsequent years apparently came to equate environmentalism with socialism, and government regulation with tyranny.

In a 2010 book, Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway called these men “Merchants of Doubt,” and this spring the book became a documentary film, by Robert Kenner. At the heart of both works is a description of methods that were honed by the tobacco industry in the 1960s and have since been employed to cast doubt on just about any science being cited to support new government regulations.

Dr. Oreskes, the more visible and vocal of the “Merchants” authors, has been threatened with lawsuits and vilified on conservative websites, and routinely gets hate mail calling her a communist or worse.

She established her career as a historian with a book-length study examining the role of dissent in the scientific method. As she put it a few months ago to an audience at Indiana University, she wanted to wrestle with this question: “How do you distinguish a maverick from a crank?”

Dr. Oreskes found that Wegener had been treated badly, particularly by American geologists. But he did not abandon his faith in the scientific method. He kept publishing until his death in 1930, trying to convince fellow scientists of his position, and was finally vindicated three decades later by oceanographic research conducted during the Cold War.

As she completed that study, Dr. Oreskes sought to understand how science was affected not only by the Cold War but by its end. In particular, she started wondering about climate science. Global warming had seemed to rise as an important issue around the time the Iron Curtain came down. Was this just a way for scientists to scare up research money that would no longer be coming their way through military channels?

the widespread public impression was that scientists were still divided over whether humans were primarily responsible for the warming of the planet. But how sharp was the split, she wondered?

She decided to do something no climate scientist had thought to do: count the published scientific papers. Pulling 928 of them, she was startled to find that not one dissented from the basic findings that warming was underway and human activity was the main reason.

She published that finding in a short paper in the journal Science in 2004, and the reaction was electric. Advocates of climate action seized on it as proof of a level of scientific consensus that most of them had not fully perceived. Just as suddenly, Dr. Oreskes found herself under political attack.

Some of the voices criticizing her — scientists like Dr. Singer and groups like the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington — were barely known to her at the time, Dr. Oreskes said in an interview. Just who were they?

It did not take them long to document that this group, which included prominent Cold War scientists, had been attacking environmental research for decades, challenging the science of the ozone layer and acid rain, even the finding that breathing secondhand tobacco smoke was harmful. Trying to undermine climate science was simply the latest project.

Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway came to believe that the attacks were patterned on the strategy employed by the tobacco industry when evidence of health risks first emerged. Documents pried loose by lawyers showed that the industry had paid certain scientists to contrive dubious research, had intimidated reputable scientists, and had cherry-picked evidence to present a misleading pictur

The tobacco industry had used these tactics in defense of profits. But Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway wrote that the so-called merchants of doubt had adopted them for a deep ideological reason: contempt for government regulation. The insight gave climate scientists a new way of understanding the politics that had engulfed their field.

Following Dr. Oreskes’s cue, researchers have in recent years developed a cottage industry of counting scientific papers and polling scientists. The results typically show that about 97 percent of working climate scientists accept that global warming is happening, that humans are largely responsible, and that the situation poses long-term risks, though the severity of those risks is not entirely clear. That wave of evidence has prompted many national news organizations to stop portraying the field as split evenly between scientists who are convinced and unconvinced.

Dr. Oreskes’s critics have taken delight in searching out errors in her books and other writings, prompting her to post several corrections. They have generally been minor, though, like describing a pH of six as neutral, when the correct number is seven. Dr. Oreskes described that as a typographical error.

In the leaked emails, Dr. Singer told a group of his fellow climate change denialists that he felt that Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway had libeled him. But in an interview, when pressed for specific errors in the book that might constitute libel, he listed none. Nor did he provide such a list in response to a follow-up email request.

However much she might be hated by climate change denialists, Dr. Oreskes is often welcomed on college campuses these days. She usually outlines the decades of research supporting the idea that human emissions pose serious risks.

“One of the things that should always be asked about scientific evidence is, how old is it?” Dr. Oreskes said. “It’s like wine. If the science about climate change were only a few years old, I’d be a skeptic, too.”

Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway keep looking for ways to reach new audiences. Last year, they published a short work of science fiction, written as a historical essay from the distant future. “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future” argues that conservatives, by fighting sensible action to cope with the climate crisis, are essentially guaranteeing the long-term outcome they fear, a huge expansion of government.

Behaviors strongly associated with depression—reduced physical activity and human contact, overconsumption of processed food, seeking endless distraction—are the very behaviors that more and more people now can do, are even forced to do by the nature of their sedentary, indoor jobs.

e we are gathering scientific evidence for the benefits of living close to nature, not simply for enjoying its beauty or getting spiritual sustenance but for keeping our brains and nervous systems in good working order.

Human beings evolved to thrive in natural environments and in bonded social groups. Few of us today can enjoy such a life and the emotional equilibrium it engenders, but our genetic predisposition for it has not changed.

I believ

It may seem baffling, but the explanation is simple: the human body was never designed for the modern postindustrial environment.”

Possibly, the deterioration of emotional well-being characteristic of contemporary urban life represents a cumulative effect of lifestyle changes that have been occurring over many years, an effect that is now suddenly obvious.

Not only do we suffer from nature deficit, we are experiencing information surfeit. Many people today spend much of their waking time surfing the Internet, texting and talking on mobile phones, attending to email, watching television, and being stimulated by other new media—experiences never available until now.

The allure of synthetic entertainment—television, the Internet—is eerily reminiscent of the false promise of industrial food. It seems like a distillation of the good aspects of a social life, always entertaining yet easy to abandon when it becomes tedious or challenging. But, like junk food, it is ultimately unsatisfying and potentially harmful. Our brains, genetically adapted to help us negotiate a successful course through complex, changing, and often hazardous natural environments, are suddenly confronted with an overload of information and stimulation independent of physical reality.

These are the Frankenstein remedies — botanicals, herbs, minerals, enzymes, amino acids, dried stuff. They’re “natural.” They’re not cheap. And Americans pop them like Skittles, despite recent studies showing that nearly a third of all herbal supplements on the market may be outright frauds.

We’re not talking drugs, or even, in many cases, food here. Drugs have to undergo rigorous testing and review by the federal government. Dietary supplements do not. Drugs have to prove to be effective. Dietary supplements do not.

Even though serious illnesses, and some deaths are on the rise from misuse of these supplements, Hatch is determined to keep regulators at bay. “I am committed to protect this industry and the integrity of its products,” he told a gathering of potency pill-pushers and the like in Utah last fall.

what about the medical implications? These pills and powders can’t, by law, make specific claims to cure anything. So they claim to make you healthier. The consumer is left playing doctor, reading questionable assertions that course through the unfiltered garbage of the Internet.

there was this finding reported in the authoritative Annals of Internal Medicine: “Enough is enough: Stop wasting money on vitamin and mineral supplements.”

So, the industry keeps growing, with 65,000 dietary supplements now on the market, consumed by nearly half of all Americans. The larger issue is mistrust of authority, a willful ignorance that knows no political side. Thus, right-wing libertarians promote a freewheeling market of quack products, while left-wing conspiracy theorists disdain modern medicine in favor of anything sold as “natural” or vaguely countercultural. These are some of the same people who will not vaccinate their children.

Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts.

Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before. For many of us this new world is wondrous, comfortable, and rich in rewards—but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we can’t easily analyze.

The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t easy.

In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle that’s what science is for.

“Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt,

“Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”

The scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes hard to swallow.

We don’t believe you.

Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant. Two centuries later Charles Darwin escaped that fate. But his idea that all life on Earth evolved from a primordial ancestor and that we humans are distant cousins of apes, whales, and even deep-sea mollusks is still a big ask for a lot of people. So is another 19th-century notion: that carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that we all exhale all the time and that makes up less than a tenth of one percent of the atmosphere, could be affecting Earth’s climate.

we intellectually accept these precepts of science, we subconsciously cling to our intuitions

Shtulman’s research indicates that as we become scientifically literate, we repress our naive beliefs but never eliminate them entirely. They lurk in our brains, chirping at us as we try to make sense of the world.

Most of us do that by relying on personal experience and anecdotes, on stories rather than statistics.

We have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning.

we can deceive ourselves.

Even for scientists, the scientific method is a hard discipline. Like the rest of us, they’re vulnerable to what they call confirmation bias—the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us, they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them

other scientists will try to reproduce them

Scientific results are always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by some future experiment or observation. Scientists rarely proclaim an absolute truth or absolute certainty. Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.

Many people in the United States—a far greater percentage than in other countries—retain doubts about that consensus or believe that climate activists are using the threat of global warming to attack the free market and industrial society generally.

news media give abundant attention to such mavericks, naysayers, professional controversialists, and table thumpers. The media would also have you believe that science is full of shocking discoveries made by lone geniuses

science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else—but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research.

But industry PR, however misleading, isn’t enough to explain why only 40 percent of Americans, according to the most recent poll from the Pew Research Center, accept that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming.

“science communication problem,”

yielded abundant new research into how people decide what to believe—and why they so often don’t accept the scientific consensus.

higher literacy was associated with stronger views—at both ends of the spectrum. Science literacy promoted polarization on climate, not consensus. According to Kahan, that’s because people tend to use scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped by their worldview.

“egalitarian” and “communitarian” mind-set are generally suspicious of industry and apt to think it’s up to something dangerous that calls for government regulation; they’re likely to see the risks of climate change.

“hierarchical” and “individualistic” mind-set respect leaders of industry and don’t like government interfering in their affairs; they’re apt to reject warnings about climate change, because they know what accepting them could lead to—some kind of tax or regulation to limit emissions.

For a hierarchical individualist, Kahan says, it’s not irrational to reject established climate science: Accepting it wouldn’t change the world, but it might get him thrown out of his tribe.

Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers.

organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.

Internet makes it easier than ever for climate skeptics and doubters of all kinds to find their own information and experts

Internet has democratized information, which is a good thing. But along with cable TV, it has made it possible to live in a “filter bubble” that lets in only the information with which you already agree.

How to convert climate skeptics? Throwing more facts at them doesn’t help.

people need to hear from believers they can trust, who share their fundamental values.

We believe in scientific ideas not because we have truly evaluated all the evidence but because we feel an affinity for the scientific community.

“Believing in evolution is just a description about you. It’s not an account of how you reason.”

evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter—and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.

Doubting science also has consequences.

In the climate debate the consequences of doubt are likely global and enduring. In the U.S., climate change skeptics have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative action to combat global warming.

“That line between science communication and advocacy is very hard to step back from,”

It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app.

that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science.

not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it.

for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

Students come away thinking of science as a collection of facts, not a method.

Shtulman’s research has shown that even many college students don’t really understand what evidence is.

“Everybody should be questioning,” says McNutt. “That’s a hallmark of a scientist. But then they should use the scientific method, or trust people using the scientific method, to decide which way they fall on those questions.”

science has made us the dominant organisms,

incredibly rapid change, and it’s scary sometimes. It’s not all progress.

Mr. Trachtenberg understood the centrality of the university as a physical place. New structures were a visceral sign of progress. They told visitors, donors and civic leaders that the institution was, like beams and scaffolding rising from the earth, ascending. He added new programs, recruited more students, and followed the dictate of constant expansion.

the American research university had evolved into a complicated and somewhat peculiar organization. It was built to be all things to all people: to teach undergraduates, produce knowledge, socialize young men and women, train workers for jobs, anchor local economies, even put on weekend sports events. And excellence was defined by similarity to old, elite institutions. Universities were judged by the quality of their scholars, the size of their endowments, the beauty of their buildings and the test scores of their incoming students.

John Silber embarked on a huge building campaign while bringing luminaries like Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel on board to teach and lend their prestige to the B.U. name, creating a bigger, more famous and much more costly institution. He had helped write a game plan for the aspiring college president.

GWU is, for all intents and purposes, a for-profit organization. Best example: study abroad. Their top program, a partnering with Sciences Po, costs each student (30 of them, on a program with 'prestige' status?) a full semester's tuition. It costs GW, according to Sciences Po website, €1000. A neat $20,000 profit per student (who is in digging her/himself deeper and deeper in debt.) Moreover, the school takes a $500 admin fee for the study abroad application! With no guarantee that all credits transfer. Students often lose a partial semester, GW profits again. Nor does GW offer help with an antiquated, one-shot/no transfers, tricky registration process. It's tough luck in gay Paris.Just one of many examples. Dorms with extreme mold, off-campus housing impossible for freshmen and sophomores. Required meal plan: Chick-o-Filet etc. Classes with over 300 students (required).This is not Harvard, but costs same.Emotional problems? Counselors too few. Suicides continue and are not appropriately addressed. Caring environment? Extension so and so, please hold.It's an impressive campus, I'm an alum. If you apply, make sure the DC experience is worth the price: good are internships, a few colleges like Elliot School, post-grad.GWU uses undergrad $$ directly for building projects, like the medical center to which students have NO access. (Student health facility is underfunded, outsourced.)Outstanding professors still make a difference. But is that enough?

Mr. Trachtenberg, however, understood something crucial about the modern university. It had come to inhabit a market for luxury goods. People don’t buy Gucci bags merely for their beauty and functionality. They buy them because other people will know they can afford the price of purchase. The great virtue of a luxury good, from the manufacturer’s standpoint, isn’t just that people will pay extra money for the feeling associated with a name brand. It’s that the high price is, in and of itself, a crucial part of what people are buying.

Mr. Trachtenberg convinced people that George Washington was worth a lot more money by charging a lot more money. Unlike most college presidents, he was surprisingly candid about his strategy. College is like vodka, he liked to explain.

The Absolut Rolex plan worked. The number of applicants surged from some 6,000 to 20,000, the average SAT score of students rose by nearly 200 points, and the endowment jumped from $200 million to almost $1 billion.

The university became a magnet for the children of new money who didn’t quite have the SATs or family connections required for admission to Stanford or Yale. It also aggressively recruited international students, rich families from Asia and the Middle East who believed, as nearly everyone did, that American universities were the best in the world.

U.S. News & World Report now ranks the university at No. 54 nationwide, just outside the “first tier.”

The watch and vodka analogies are correct. Personally, I used car analogies when discussing college choices with my kids. We were in the fortunate position of being able to comfortably send our kids to any college in the country and have them leave debt free. Notwithstanding, I told them that they would be going to a state school unless they were able to get into one of about 40 schools that I felt, in whatever arbitrary manner I decided, that was worth the extra cost. They both ended up going to state schools.College is by and large a commodity and you get out of it what you put into it. Both of my kids worked hard in college and were involved in school life. They both left the schools better people and the schools better schools for them being there. They are both now successful adults.I believe too many people look for the prestige of a named school and that is not what college should be primarily about.

In 2013, only 14 percent of the university’s 10,000 undergraduates received a grant — a figure on a par with elite schools but far below the national average. The average undergraduate borrower leaves with about $30,800 in debt.

When I talk to the best high school students in my state I always stress the benefits of the honors college experience at an affordable public university. For students who won't qualify for a public honors college. the regular pubic university experience is far preferable to the huge debt of places like GW.

Carey would do well to look beyond high ticket private universities (which after all are still private enterprises) and what he describes as the Olympian heights of higher education (which for some reason seems also to embitter him) and look at the system overall . The withdrawal of public support was never a policy choice; it was a political choice, "packaged and branded" as some tax cutting palaver all wrapped up in the argument that a free-market should decide how much college should cost and how many seats we need. In such an environment, trustees at private universities are no more solely responsible for turning their degrees into commodities than the administrations of state universities are for raising the number of out-of-state students in order to offset the loss of support from their legislatures. No doubt, we will hear more about market based solutions and technology from Mr. Carey

I went to GW back in the 60s. It was affordable and it got me away from home in New York. While I was there, Newsweek famously published a article about the DC Universities - GW, Georgetown, American and Catholic - dubbing them the Pony league, the schools for the children of wealthy middle class New Yorkers who couldn't get into the Ivy League. Nobody really complained. But that wasn't me. I went because I wanted to be where the action was in the 60s, and as we used to say - "GW was literally a stone's throw from the White House. And we could prove it." Back then, the two biggest alumni names were Jackie Kennedy, who's taken some classes there, and J. Edgar Hoover. Now, according to the glossy magazine they send me each month, it's the actress Kerry Washington. There's some sort of progress there, but I'm a GW alum and not properly trained to understand it.

This explains a lot of the modern, emerging mentality. It encompasses the culture of enforced grade inflation, cheating and anti-intellectualism in much of higher education. It is consistent with our culture of misleading statistics and information, cronyism and fake quality, the "best and the brightest" being only schemers and glad handers. The wisdom and creativity engendered by an honest, rigorous academic education are replaced by the disingenuous quick fix, the winner-take-all mentality that neglects the common good.

I attended nearby Georgetown University and graduated in 1985. Relative to state schools and elite schools, it was expensive then. I took out loans. I had Pell grants. I had work-study and GSL. I paid my debt of $15,000 off in ten years. Would I have done it differently? Yes: I would have continued on to graduate school and not worried about paying off those big loans right after college. My career work out and I am grateful for the education I received and paid for. But I would not recommend to my nieces and nephews debts north of $100,000 for a BA in liberal arts. Go community. Then go state. Then punch your ticket to Harvard, Yale or Stanford — if you are good enough.

American universities appear to have more and more drifted away from educating individuals and citizens to becoming high priced trade schools and purveyors of occupational licenses. Lost in the process is the concept of expanding a student's ability to appreciate broadly and deeply, as well as the belief that a republican democracy needs an educated citizenry, not a trained citizenry, to function well.Both the Heisman Trophy winner and the producer of a successful tech I.P.O. likely have much in common, a college education whose rewards are limited to the financial. I don't know if I find this more sad on the individual level or more worrisome for the future of America.

This is now a consumer world for everything, including institutions once thought to float above the Shakespearean briars of the work-a-day world such as higher education, law and medicine. Students get this. Parents get this. Everything is negotiable: financial aid, a spot in the nicest dorm, tix to the big game. But through all this, there are faculty - lots of 'em - who work away from the fluff to link the ambitions of the students with the reality and rigor of the 21st century. The job of the student is to get beyond the visible hype of the surroundings and find those faculty members. They will make sure your investment is worth it

My experience in managing or working with GW alumni in their 20's or 30's has not been good. Virtually all have been mentally lazy and/or had a stunning sense of entitlement. Basically they've been all talk and no results. That's been quite a contrast to the graduates from VA/MD state universities.

More and more, I notice what my debt-financed contributions to the revenue streams of my vendors earn them, not me. My banks earned enough to pay ridiculous bonuses to employees for reckless risk-taking. My satellite tv operator earned enough to overpay ESPN for sports programming that I never watch--and that, in turn, overpays these idiotic pro athletes and college sports administrators. My health insurer earned enough to defeat one-payor insurance; to enable the opaque, inefficient billing practices of hospitals and other providers; and to feed the behemoth pharmaceutical industry. My church earned enough to buy the silence of sex abuse victims and oppose progressive political candidates. And my govt earned enough to continue ag subsidies, inefficient defense spending, and obsolete transportation and energy policies.

as the parent of GWU freshman I am grateful for every opportunity afforded her. She has a generous merit scholarship, is in the honors program with some small classes, and has access to internships that can be done while at school. GWU also gave her AP credits to advance her to sophomore status. Had she attended the state flagship school (where she was accepted into that exclusive honors program) she would have a great education but little else. It's not possible to do foreign affairs related internship far from D.C. or Manhattan. She went to a very competitive high school where for the one or two ivy league schools in which she was interested, she didn't have the same level of connections or wealth as many of her peers. Whether because of the Common Application or other factors, getting into a good school with financial help is difficult for a middle class student like my daughter who had a 4.0 GPA and 2300 on the SAT. She also worked after school.The bottom line - GWU offered more money than perceived "higher tier" universities, and brought tuition to almost that of our state school system. And by the way, I think she is also getting a very good education.

This article reinforces something I have learned during my daughter's college application process. Most students choose a school based on emotion (reputation) and not value. This luxury good analogy holds up.

The entire education problem can be solved by MOOCs lots and lots of them plus a few closely monitored tests and personal interviews with people. Of course many many people make MONEY off of our entirely inefficient way of "educating" -- are we even really doing that -- getting a degree does NOT mean one is actually educated

As a first-generation college graduate I entered GW ambitious but left saddled with debt, and crestfallen at the hard-hitting realization that my four undergraduate years were an aberration from what life is actually like post-college: not as simple as getting an [unpaid] internship with a fancy titled institution, as most Colonials do. I knew how to get in to college, but what do you do after the recess of life ends?I learned more about networking, resume plumping (designated responses to constituents...errr....replied to emails), and elevator pitches than actual theory, economic principles, strong writing skills, critical thinking, analysis, and philosophy. While relatively easy to get a job after graduating (for many with a GW degree this is sadly not the case) sustaining one and excelling in it is much harder. It's never enough just to be able to open a new door, you also need to be prepared to navigate your way through that next opportunity.

this is a very telling article. Aimless and directionless high school graduates are matched only by aimless and directionless institutes of higher learning. Each child and each parent should start with a goal - before handing over their hard earned tuition dollars, and/or leaving a trail of broken debt in the aftermath of a substandard, unfocused education.

it is no longer the most expensive university in America. It is the 46th.Others have been implementing the Absolut Rolex Plan. John Sexton turned New York University into a global higher-education player by selling the dream of downtown living to students raised on “Sex and the City.” Northeastern followed Boston University up the ladder. Under Steven B. Sample, the University of Southern California became a U.S. News top-25 university. Washington University in St. Louis did the same.

I currently attend GW, and I have to say, this article completely misrepresents the situation. I have yet to meet a single person who is paying the full $60k tuition - I myself am paying $30k, because the school gave me $30k in grants. As for the quality of education, Foreign Policy rated GW the #8 best school in the world for undergraduate education in international affairs, Princeton Review ranks it as one of the best schools for political science, and U.S. News ranks the law school #20. The author also ignores the role that an expanding research profile plays in growing a university's prestige and educational power.

And in hundreds of regional universities and community colleges, presidents and deans and department chairmen have watched this spectacle of ascension and said to themselves, “That could be me.” Agricultural schools and technical institutes are lobbying state legislatures for tuition increases and Ph.D. programs, fitness centers and arenas for sport. Presidents and boards are drawing up plans to raise tuition, recruit “better” students and add academic programs. They all want to go in one direction — up! — and they are all moving with a single vision of what they want to be.

this is the same playbook used by hospitals the past 30 years or so. It is how Hackensack Hospital became Hackensack Medical Center and McComb Hospital became Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center. No wonder the results have been the same in healthcare and higher education; both have priced themselves out of reach for average Americans.

a world where a college is rated not by the quality of its output, but instaed, by the quality of its inputs. A world where there is practically no work to be done by the administration because the college's reputation is made before the first class even begins! This is isanity! But this is the swill that the mammoth college marketing departments nationwide have shoved down America's throat. Colleges are ranked not by the quality of their graduates, but rather, by the test scores of their incoming students!

The Pew Foundation has been doing surveys on what students learn, how much homework they do, how much time they spend with professors etc. All good stuff to know before a student chooses a school. It is called the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE - called Nessy). It turns out that the higher ranked schools do NOT allow their information to be released to the public. It is SECRET.Why do you think that is?

The article blames "the standard university organizational model left teaching responsibilities to autonomous academic departments and individual faculty members, each of which taught and tested in its own way." This is the view of someone who has never taught at a university, nor thought much about how education there actually happens. Once undergraduates get beyond the general requirements, their educations _have_ to depend on "autonomous departments" because it's only those departments know what the requirements for given degree can be, and can grant the necessary accreditation of a given student. The idea that some administrator could know what's necessary for degrees in everything from engineering to fiction writing is nonsense, except that's what the people who only know the theory of education (but not its practice) actually seem to think. In the classroom itself, you have tremendously talented people, who nevertheless have their own particular strengths and approaches. Don't you think it's a good idea to let them do what they do best rather than trying to make everyone teach the same way? Don't you think supervision of young teachers by older colleagues, who actually know their field and its pedagogy, rather than some administrator, who knows nothing of the subject, is a good idea?

it makes me very sad to see how expensive some public schools have become. Used to be you could work your way through a public school without loans, but not any more. Like you, I had the advantage of a largely-scholarship paid undergraduate education at a top private college. However, I was also offered a virtually free spot in my state university's (then new) honors college

My daughter attended a good community college for a couple of classes during her senior year of high school and I could immediately see how such places are laboratories for failure. They seem like high schools in atmosphere and appearance. Students rush in by car and rush out again when the class is over.The four year residency college creates a completely different feel. On arrival, you get the sense that you are engaging in something important, something apart and one that will require your full attention. I don't say this is for everyone or that the model is not flawed in some ways (students actually only spend 2 1/2 yrs. on campus to get the four yr. degree). College is supposed to be a 60 hour per week job. Anything less than that and the student is seeking himself or herself

This. Is. STUNNING. I have always wondered, especially as my kids have approached college age, why American colleges have felt justified in raising tuition at a rate that has well exceeded inflation, year after year after year. (Nobody needs a dorm with luxury suites and a lazy river pool at college!) And as it turns out, they did it to become luxury brands. Just that simple. Incredible.I don't even blame this guy at GWU for doing what he did. He wasn't made responsible for all of American higher ed. But I do think we all need to realize what happened, and why. This is front page stuff.

I agree with you, but, unfortunately, given the choice between low tuition, primitive dorms, and no athletic center VS expensive & luxurious, the customers (and their parents) are choosing the latter. As long as this is the case, there is little incentive to provide bare-bones and cheap education.

Wesleyan University in CT is one school that is moving down the rankings. Syracuse University is another. Reed College is a third. Why? Because these schools try hard to stay out of the marketing game. (With its new president, Syracuse has jumped back into the game.) Bryn Mawr College, outside Philadelphia hasn't fared well over the past few decades in the rankings, which is true of practically every women's college. Wellesley is by far the highest ranked women's college, but even there the acceptance rate is significantly higher than one finds at comparable coed liberal arts colleges like Amherst & Williams. University of Chicago is another fascinating case for Mr. Carey to study (I'm sure he does in his forthcoming book, which I look forward to reading). Although it has always enjoyed an illustrious academic reputation, until recently Chicago's undergraduate reputation paled in comparison to peer institutions on the two coasts. A few years ago, Chicago changed its game plan to more closely resemble Harvard and Stanford in undergraduate amenities, and lo and behold, its rankings shot up. It was a very cynical move on the president's part to reassemble the football team, but it was a shrewd move because athletics draw more money than academics ever can (except at engineering schools like Cal Tech & MIT), and more money draws richer students from fancier secondary schools with higher test scores, which lead to higher rankings - and the beat goes on.

College INDUSTRY is out of control. Sorry, NYU, GW, BU are not worth the price. Are state schools any better? We have the University of Michigan, which is really not a state school, but a university that gives a discount to people who live in Michigan. Why? When you have an undergraduate body 40+% out-of-state that pays tuition of over $50K/year, you tell me?Perhaps the solution is two years of community college followed by two at places like U of M or Michigan State - get the same diploma at the end for much less and beat the system.

In one recent yr., the majority of undergrad professors at Harvard, according to Boston.com, where adjuncts. That means low pay, no benefits, no office, temp workers. Harvard.Easily available student loans fueled this arms race of amenities and frills that in which colleges now engage. They moved the cost of education onto the backs of people, kids, who don't understand what they are doing.Students in colleges these days are customers and the customers must be able to get through. If it requires dumbing things down, so be it. On top of tuition, G.W. U. is known by its students as the land of added fees on top of added fees. The joke around campus was that they would soon be installing pay toilets in the student union. No one was laughing.

You could written the same story about my alma mater, American University. The place reeked of ambition and upward mobility decades ago and still does. Whoever's running it now must look at its measly half-billion-dollar endowment and compare it to GWU's $1.5 billion and seethe with envy, while GWU's president sets his sights on an Ivy League-size endowment. And both get back to their real jobs: 24/7 fundraising,Which is what university presidents are all about these days. Money - including million-dollar salaries for themselves (GWU's president made more than Harvard's in 2011) - pride, cachet, power, a mansion, first-class all the way. They should just be honest about it and change their university's motto to Ostende mihi pecuniam! (please excuse my questionable Latin)Whether the students are actually learning anything is up to them, I guess - if they do, it's thanks to the professors, adjuncts and the administrative staff, who do the actual work of educating and keep the school running.

When I was in HS (70s), many of my richer friends went to GW and I was then of the impression that GW was a 'good' school. As I age, I have come to realize that this place is just another façade to the emptiness that has become America. All too often are we faced with a dilemma: damned if we do, damned if we don't. Yep, 'education' has become a trap for all too many of our citizen.

I transferred to GWU from a state school. I am forever grateful that I did. I wanted to get a good rigorous education and go to one of the best International Affairs schools in the world. Even though the state school I went to was dirt-cheap, the education and the faculty was awful. I transferred to GW and was amazed at the professors at that university. An ambassador or a prominent IA scholar taught every class. GW is an expensive school, but that is the free market. If you want a good education you need to be willing to pay for it or join the military. I did the latter and my school was completely free with no debt and I received an amazing education. If young people aren't willing to make some sort of sacrifice to get ahead or just expect everything to be given to then our country is in a sad state.We need to stop blaming universities like GWU that strive to attract better students, better professors, and better infrastructure. They are doing what is expected in America, to better oneself.

"Whether the students are actually learning anything is up to them, I guess." How could it possibly be otherwise??? I am glad that you are willing to give credit to teachers and administrators, but it is not they who "do the actual work of educating." From this fallacy comes its corollary, that we should blame teachers first for "under-performing schools". This long-running show of scapegoating may suit the wallets and vanity of American parents, but it is utterly senseless. When, if ever, American culture stops reeking of arrogance, greed and anti-intellectualism, things may improve, and we may resume the habit of bothering to learn. Until then, nothing doing.

Universities sell knowledge and grade students on how much they have learned. Fundamentally, there is conflict of interest in thsi setup. Moreover, students who are poorly educated, even if they know this, will not criticize their school, because doing so would make it harder for them to have a career. As such, many problems with higher education remain unexposed to the public.

I've lectured and taught in at least five different countries in three continents and the shortest perusal of what goes on abroad would totally undermine most of these speculations. For one thing American universities are unique in their dedication to a broad based liberal arts type education. In France, Italy or Germany, for example, you select a major like mathematics or physics and then in your four years you will not take even one course in another subject. The amount of work that you do that is critically evaluated by an instructor is a tiny fraction of what is done in an American University. While half educated critics based on profoundly incomplete research write criticism like this Universities in Germany Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea and Japan as well as France have appointed committees and made studies to explain why the American system of higher education so drastically outperforms their own system. Elsewhere students do get a rather nice dose of general education but it ends in secondary school and it has the narrowness and formulaic quality that we would just normally associate with that. The character who wrote this article probably never set foot on a "campus" of the University of Paris or Rome

The university is part of a complex economic system and it is responding to the demands of that system. For example, students and parents choose universities that have beautiful campuses and buildings. So universities build beautiful campuses. State support of universities has greatly declined, and this decline in funding is the greatest cause of increased tuition. Therefore universities must compete for dollars and must build to attract students and parents. Also, universities are not ranked based on how they educate students -- that's difficult to measure so it is not measured. Instead universities are ranked on research publications. So while universities certainly put much effort into teaching, research has to have a priority in order for the university to survive. Also universities do not force students and parents to attend high price institutions. Reasonably priced state institutions and community colleges are available to every student. Community colleges have an advantage because they are funded by property taxes. Finally learning requires good teaching, but it also requires students that come to the university funded, prepared, and engaged. This often does not happen. Conclusion- universities have to participate in profile raising actions in order to survive. The day that funding is provided for college, ranking is based on education, and students choose campuses with simple buildings, then things will change at the university.

This is the inevitable result of privatizing higher education. In the not-so-distant past, we paid for great state universities through our taxes, not tuition. Then, the states shifted funding to prisons and the Federal government radically cut research support and the GI bill. Instead, today we expect universities to support themselves through tuition, and to the extent that we offered students support, it is through non-dischargeable loans. To make matters worse, the interest rates on those loans are far above the government's cost of funds -- so in effect the loans are an excise tax on education (most of which is used to support a handful of for-profit institutions that account for the most student defaults). This "consumer sovereignty" privatized model of funding education works no better than privatizing California's electrical system did in the era of Enron, or our privatized funding of medical service, or our increasingly privatized prison system: it drives up costs at the same time that it replace quality with marketing.

There are data in some instances on student learning, but the deeper problem, as I suspect the author already knows, is that there is nothing like a consensus on how to measure that learning, or even on when is the proper end point to emphasize (a lot of what I teach -- I know this from what students have told me -- tends to come into sharp focus years after graduation).

Michael (Baltimore) has hit the nail on the head. Universities are increasingly corporatized institutions in the credentialing business. Knowledge, for those few who care about it (often not those paying for the credentials) is available freely because there's no profit in it. Like many corporate entities, it is increasingly run by increasingly highly paid administrators, not faculty.

GWU has not defined itself in any unique way, it has merely embraced the bland, but very expensive, accoutrements of American private education: luxury dorms, food courts, spa-like gyms, endless extracurricular activities, etc. But the real culprit for this bloat that students have to bear financially is the college ranking system by US News, Princeton Review, etc. An ultimately meaningless exercise in competition that has nevertheless pushed colleges and universities to be more like one another. A sad state of affairs, and an extremely expensive one for students

It is long past time to realize the failure of the Reagonomics-neoliberal private profits over public good program. In education, we need to return to public institutions publicly funded. Just as we need to recognize that Medicare, Social Security, the post office, public utilities, fire departments, interstate highway system, Veterans Administration hospitals and the GI bill are models to be improved and expanded, not destroyed.

George Washington is actually not a Rolex watch, it is a counterfeit Rolex. The real Rolexes of higher education -- places like Hopkins, Georgetown, Duke, the Ivies etc. -- have real endowments and real financial aid. No middle class kid is required to borrow $100,000 to get a degree from those schools, because they offer generous need-based financial aid in the form of grants, not loans. The tuition at the real Rolexes is really a sticker price that only the wealthy pay -- everybody else on a sliding scale. For middle class kids who are fortunate enough to get in, Penn actually ends up costing considerably less than a state university.The fake Rolexes -- BU, NYU, Drexel in Philadelphia -- don't have the sliding scale. They bury middle class students in debt.And really, though it is foolish to borrow $100,000 or $120,000 for an undergraduate degree, I don't find the transaction morally wrong. What is morally wrong is our federal government making that loan non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, so many if these kids will be having their wages garnished for the REST OF THEIR LIVES.There is a very simple solution to this, by the way. Cap the amount of non-dischargeable student loan debt at, say, $50,000

The slant of this article is critical of the growth of research universities. Couldn't disagree more. Modern research universities create are incredibly engines of economic opportunity not only for the students (who pay the bills) but also for the community via the creation of blue and white collar jobs. Large research university employ tens of thousands of locals from custodial and food service workers right up to high level administrators and specialist in finance, computer services, buildings and facilities management, etc. Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland system employ more people than any other industry in Maryland -- including the government. Research universities typically have hospitals providing cutting-edge medical care to the community. Local business (from cafes to property rental companies) benefit from a built-in, long-term client base as well as an educated workforce. And of course they are the foundry of new knowledge which is critical for the future growth of our country.Check out the work of famed economist Dr. Julia Lane on modeling the economic value of the research university. In a nutshell, there are few better investments America can make in herself than research universities. We are the envy of the world in that regard -- and with good reason. How many *industries* (let alone jobs) have Stanford University alone catalyzed?

What universities have the monopoly on is the credential. Anyone can learn, from books, from free lectures on the internet, from this newspaper, etc. But only universities can endow you with the cherished degree. For some reason, people are will to pay more for one of these pieces of paper with a certain name on it -- Ivy League, Stanford, even GW -- than another -- Generic State U -- though there is no evidence one is actually worth more in the marketplace of reality than the other. But, by the laws of economics, these places are actually underpriced: after all, something like 20 times more people are trying to buy a Harvard education than are allowed to purchase one. Usually that means you raise your price.

Overalll a good article, except for - "This comes on the heels of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s “Academically Adrift,” a study that found “limited or no learning” among many college students." The measure of learning you report was a general thinking skills exam. That's not a good measure of college gains. Most psychologists and cognitive scientists worth their salt would tell you that improvement in critical thinking skills is going to be limited to specific areas. In other words, learning critical thinking skills in math will make little change in critical thinking about political science or biology. Thus we should not expect huge improvements in general critical thinking skills, but rather improvements in a student's major and other areas of focus, such as a minor. Although who has time for a minor when it is universally acknowledged that the purpose of a university is to please and profit an employer or, if one is lucky, an investor. Finally, improved critical thinking skills are not the end all and be all of a college education even given this profit centered perspective. Learning and mastering the cumulative knowledge of past generations is arguably the most important thing to be gained, and most universities still tend to excel at that even with the increasing mandate to run education like a business and cultivate and cull the college "consumer".

As for community colleges, there was an article in the Times several years ago that said it much better than I could have said it myself: community colleges are places where dreams are put on hold. Without making the full commitment to study, without leaving the home environment, many, if not most, community college students are caught betwixt and between, trying to balance work responsibilities, caring for a young child or baby and attending classes. For males, the classic "end of the road" in community college is to get a car, a job and a girlfriend, one who is not in college, and that is the end of the dream. Some can make it, but most cannot.

as a scientist I disagree with the claim that undergrad tuition subsidizes basic research. Nearly all lab equipment and research personnel (grad students, technicians, anyone with the title "research scientist" or similar) on campus is paid for through federal grants. Professors often spend all their time outside teaching and administration writing grant proposals, as the limited federal grant funds mean ~%85 of proposals must be rejected. What is more, out of each successful grant the university levies a "tax", called "overhead", of 30-40%, nominally to pay for basic operations (utilities, office space, administrators). So in fact one might say research helps fund the university rather than the other way around. Flag

It's certainly overrated as a research and graduate level university. Whether it is good for getting an undergraduate education is unclear, but a big part of the appeal is getting to live in D.C..while attending college instead of living in some small college town in the corn fields.

Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we’d leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development.

Now that our industrial civilization has truly gone global, humanity’s collective activity is laying down a variety of traces that will be detectable by scientists 100 million years in the future. The extensive use of fertilizer, for example

Likewise our relentless hunger for the rare-Earth elements used in electronic gizmos. Far more of these atoms are now wandering around the planet’s surface because of us than would otherwise be the case. They might also show up in future sediments, too.

And then there’s all that plastic. Studies have shown increasing amounts of plastic “marine litter” are being deposited on the seafloor everywhere from coastal areas to deep basins and even in the Arctic. Wind, sun, and waves grind down large-scale plastic artifacts, leaving the seas full of microscopic plastic particles that will eventually rain down on the ocean floor, creating a layer that could persist for geological timescales.

ronically, however, the most promising marker of humanity’s presence as an advanced civilization is a by-product of one activity that may threaten it most.

The more fossil fuels we burn, the more the balance of these carbon isotopes shifts. Atmospheric scientists call this shift the Suess effect, and the change in isotopic ratios of carbon due to fossil-fuel use is easy to see over the last century. Increases in temperature also leave isotopic signals. These shifts should be apparent to any future scientist who chemically analyzes exposed layers of rock from our era. Along with these spikes, this Anthropocene layer might also hold brief peaks in nitrogen, plastic nanoparticles, and even synthetic steroids

Fifty-six million years ago, Earth passed through the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, the planet’s average temperature climbed as high as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above what we experience today. It was a world almost without ice, as typical summer temperatures at the poles reached close to a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit.