STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

October 5, 2026 ​

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AI-Infused Job Market, Dismal for Grads, Exacerbated by Lack of Free Thinking on Campus

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Two recent reports confirmed what many seem to know already about today’s AI-infused job market -- times are tough for new grads looking to launch their careers.

 

“But making matters worse is the fact that college students are not being taught to think independently and problem solve, prompting companies to tend to hire older workers, one expert told The College Fix.

 

“’Students are not being prepared to think boundlessly about contentious issues, and this lack of development greatly limits their success in the outside world and real life,’ according to Connie Buehler, a talent recruiter. 

 

“By the numbers, graduates from AI-vulnerable majors have seen initial employment drop by 5 percent and starting salaries fall by 13 percent, which is akin to graduating during a major recession, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report published this month....

 

“Stanford University economist Erik Brynjolfsson told NPR that ‘AI is not the whole story, but it’s part of the story and the evidence is building.’

 

“Brynjolfsson said when companies decide to let go of employees or cut back on hiring, junior roles are usually the first to go. He noted large language models are also trained on codified knowledge found in textbooks and documents, creating a considerable overlap with entry-level workers because it is the same kind of knowledge they rely on to enter the workforce....

 

“Buehler also expressed difficulty finding students willing to put in the work to begin their careers: ‘One requested a job only if there was a nice boss; one wanted a 30-hour work week so he could work on his social justice projects; and one wouldn’t complete the ‘challenging’ online case during the application process that would have been so worth it in the long run.’

 

“Buehler suggested restrictions on free speech in many university classrooms as a possible hindrance to students developing critical skills needed for the work force.

 

“‘I found that many of their classes started within a ‘cramped intellectual space,’ with predetermined outcomes and ideologies already decided,’ she said in her speech. ‘What was and remains missing from many of these classrooms is the comfort of free speech to challenge those outcomes.’” ...

 

Full article at College Fix.

 

Has University Administrative Bloat Reached a Breaking Point?

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Excerpt (links in the original):

 

“If you feel like you spend more time than ever in front of your screen doing pointless busywork, there’s now a name for that: ‘Bloat 2.0.’ That’s what Barry Lam, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Riverside, calls the never-ending expansion of digital tasks required by a never-ending stream of clunky new computer programs imposed by a metastasizing mob of administrators.

 

“In a recent essay in The Boston Globe titled ‘College Campuses Need to Be Liberated From Their Administrators,’ Lam asks whether we can wake from this digitally enhanced nightmare.

 

“As the name suggests, ‘Bloat 2.0’ has a predecessor: ‘Bloat 1.0,’ the tendency of universities to hire more and more administrators even as the number of both faculty and students remains flat or declines. Lam cites a recent study of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showing that since the mid-1980s, the student body grew 8 percent, the faculty grew about 9 percent, and the number of administrators increased by 189 percent. 'There are now more nonteaching administrative staff than students at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford,’ Lam writes. The Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg named this development ‘the all-administrative university’ in his 2011 book, The Fall of the Faculty.

 

“The battle against bloat has taken on fresh salience in recent months. The members of Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education stressed that administrative growth ‘matters for both external and internal trust,’ urging the university to ‘streamline bureaucracy.’ Yale’s president, Maurie McInnis, has made it a priority. Cornell’s report on the ‘Future of the American University,’ published in September, focuses less on the number of administrators than how power is distributed within the university. One member of the committee that produced the report, Richard Geddes, an economist, argues in an addendum: ‘There has been a substitution of faculty control for that of bureaucrats over time, which unsurprisingly has coincided with university bureaucratic growth as well as declining public trust.’

 

“We talked with Lam about bloat in both its phases, where it all comes from, whether AI will make bloat better or worse, and if professors have finally had enough.”...

 

[Followed by interview of Prof. Lam.]

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Full article and interview at Chronicle of Higher Education.

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See also “Warning Signs in the Numbers” at our Stanford Concerns webpage and where, per the graph provided to us by members of Stanford's own faculty, Stanford’s faculty went from approximately 1,850 in the year 2000 to approximately 2,200 22 years later while, during that same time period, Stanford’s managerial and professional staff went from approximately 2,800 to nearly 13,000 (and, per Stanford Facts 2026, is now at 17,678). 

 

As also shown at our Stanford Concerns webpage, Stanford’s annual administrative cost per student is $52,099 – the highest of any U.S. college or university and as compared to $50,442 at Harvard, $34,093 at Caltech, $31,724 at Princeton, $29,275 at MIT, $26,281 at Yale, $25,622 at University of Chicago, $22,887 at Duke, $19,349 at Vanderbilt, $17,756 at Penn, $17,003 at Columbia, $10,654 at Berkeley, $8,960 at UCLA and $7,811 at Michigan. Stanford officials say in response that at least some of this cost is clinical staff which still doesn’t make sense since those costs are supposed to be on the medical center’s separate budget, not the university’s, and it should also be noted that the majority of the other universities listed above also have medical schools and medical centers and do NOT have the sorts of unusually high administrative costs that Stanford is showing.

 

The Harvard Anthropologist Who’s Skewering His Own Field

 

Excerpt (links in the original:

“When Joseph Henrich, an anthropologist at Harvard University, agreed to study the question of whether his field is overly politicized, he knew he ‘wasn’t going to make everyone happy,’ he says.

 

"Correct.

 

“In June, Henrich and nine other scholars released a report with withering criticisms of the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Research was being evaluated by political criteria, not traditional standards of rigor and objectivity, the panel concluded. This was found to be true in every field studied: history, philosophy, sociology, literary studies, music studies. But anthropology was ‘the most extreme’ case of things gone wrong. That discipline showed ‘a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished,’ the report declares.” ...

 

Full article at Chronicle of Higher Education. 

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See also “Why So Many Social Science Claims Are False” at Real Clear Investigations: “The growing competition and ‘publish or perish’ culture in academia might conflict with the objectivity and integrity of research, because it forces scientists to produce ‘publishable’ results at all costs,’ Daniele Fanelli, a meta-scientist at Heriot-Watt University and the London School of Economics, noted in a recent paper.” 

 

Nationwide Reductions in PhD Programs

 

Excerpts:

 

“Universities across the country are slashing admissions to doctoral programs and freezing faculty hiring as they come under financial strain. Facing a $160 million deficit, the University of Chicago paused admissions this year into more than a dozen PhD programs, including anthropology, social work, social thought, Middle Eastern studies, Romance languages and visual arts.

 

“Brown University suspended doctoral admissions for six humanities and social-science programs including Egyptology and Assyriology. ‘The University faces an urgent need to address the increasing cost of supporting PhD students, which now ranges from a total of $700,000 to $1 million per student,’ a faculty committee reported this spring. ‘The current costs are unsustainable and are already having significant, negative consequences on research productivity and graduate education more broadly.’

 

“The University of Wisconsin-Madison isn’t accepting doctoral applications this year for its social-welfare program. Nor is the University of California, Irvine for the history and theory of music. Harvard has slashed admissions of new doctoral students in various social-science programs as it evaluates 'the future model of Ph.D. education.'

 

“Many college grads pursue doctorates to escape the real world. Now they are getting a real-world education in economics. For years universities spent with abandon, expanding bureaucracies and graduate programs on the assumption that the federal subsidy train would keep rolling.

 

“Grad students for a time served as relatively cheap labor. In return for funding doctoral degrees, universities generally required students to help teach undergraduate courses. The result: A profusion of PhDs in fields with little practical application....

 

“In recent years, grad students have unionized and collectively bargained for more pay and generous benefits, in addition to free tuition. Cornell’s labor contract with its grad students provides a $48,367 annual stipend for 15-hour-a-week jobs. Given that fall and spring semesters run for a combined 30 weeks, this works out to roughly $107 an hour. Sweet.” ...

 

Full article at WSJ. 

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

Reclaiming Liberal Education in America

Summary of newly published book by Hoover Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz at Real Clear Politics:

 

“American campuses suffer from a variety of dysfunctions. A few of the essays in this book examine colleges’ and universities’ curtailment of due process for those accused of sexual misconduct. A number explore colleges’ and universities’ attacks on free speech and their invidious and unlawful allocation of benefits to students and faculty based on race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and gender. Several deal with colleges’ and universities’ politicization and hollowing of the curriculum. Many of the most recent essays revolve around the surge of antisemitism on campus following Iran-backed Hamas’ October 2023 massacre in southern Israel. These examine the ensuing public reckoning with the sorry condition of American higher education. And they delve into the Trump administration’s clashes with Columbia, Harvard, and other universities over antisemitism; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and free speech and intellectual diversity.”

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AI Has Made an Old Education Problem Harder to Ignore

Full op-ed by high school and college teacher Christopher Morales at Minding the Campus:

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“Teaching on both sides of the high school-to-college boundary has shown me a peculiar form of academic success: a student can finish an assignment without being able to explain what was learned. The paper is submitted. The grade is recorded. The course credit is awarded. But remove the notes, prompt, or screen, and the knowledge often disappears. That is why the panic over generative artificial intelligence (AI) feels less like the beginning of an educational crisis than the arrival of a revealing diagnostic tool. Students can now generate essays, summaries, and discussion posts in seconds. The danger is real, but the underlying weakness is older. AI did not create the gap between completing work and mastering knowledge. It made that gap much harder to ignore.”

 

AI-Proof Assignments Miss the Point

Full op-ed by Hillsdale Prof. David Diener at Real Clear Education:

 

“So, what is the purpose of education? What role do assignments play in realizing that purpose? These are the teleological questions we should be asking as we respond to new AI technologies. Too often students and professors alike have fallen into the dehumanizing trap of viewing academic assignments as a kind of transactional currency in which students produce certain types of artifacts in exchange for grades from the professors which students then can cash in for various kinds of social and economic advancement. As with lifting weights, however, the point of academic assignments is not the immediate result. The purpose of writing a term paper, for example, is not the term paper itself or the grade it earns any more than the purpose of lifting weights is for the weight to move from one vertical position to another. Rather in both cases, the purpose of the activity is the benefit that the agent receives through the formative process of doing the activity.” 

 

Four Skills Employers Want in New College Graduates

Full article at Real Clear Education:

 

“After a year spent examining the future of higher education and engaging with more than 6,000 students, faculty, staff, alumni, government officials and outside advisers, Cornell’s Committee on the Future of the American University identified a striking disconnect between what students think they need to succeed and what employers say they value.”

 

Stanford Course Will Critique AI Through Lens of African Intellectual Sovereignty

Full article at College Fix:

 

“Students will ‘work to unlearn and deconstruct epistemic injustices, dismantling unjust practices, assumptions, and institutions while actively creating new ways of knowing and being.’”

 

New Presidents at Cornell and the Ivy League Will Not Solve the DEI Problem

Full op-ed by Cornell alum Carl Neuss at Cornell Sun:

 

“Imagine the discouragement to millions of American students and citizens as the Ivies make clear that capabilities and competence pale in comparison to the dominance of social justice and identity politics in selecting faculty, staff and students.”

 

Why American Higher Education Cannot Be Reformed

Full op-ed by MIT alum Bill Frezza at Substack:

 

“Historian and complexity scientist Peter Turchin’s structural-demographic theory holds that societies destabilize when they produce far more credentialed, status-seeking individuals than there are elite positions to absorb them. Turchin traces the current American wave of 'elite overproduction' to the explosion of university enrollment and advanced-degree production since the late 1970s, which created a surplus of law-degree holders, PhDs, and MBA-credentialed strivers competing for a roughly fixed number of genuinely elite slots in law, finance, academia, media, and government.”

 

Minority Enrollment Has Increased Since Supreme Court Decision Banning Affirmative Action

Full article at College Fix: 

 

“Compared to numbers from spring 2025, black undergraduate enrollment has increased 3.4 percent, while black graduate enrollment grew by 6.5 percent. The study also shows similar improvements among Hispanic and multiracial students.... [In addition,] the spring 2025 numbers would be the first spring semester that would be expected to show the effects of the decision. There were 229,000 more black students enrolled in spring 2025 when compared to spring 2024.”

 

After Massive Backlash, Michigan Suspends Plan to Launch Pass/No Credit Grading Policy

Full article at College Fix. 

 

Why We Care -- Samples of Current Teaching, Research and Other Activities at Stanford

 

Click on each article for direct access; selections are from Stanford Report and other Stanford websites.

 

What Biological Age Tests Can and Can’t Tell You

 

How Self-Driving Cars Became Reality, and What Comes Next

 

Study Points to Novel Treatment for Mitochondrial Disease

 

What Elite Athletes Can Teach Us About Recovery from Injuries​

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