How Colleges Produce Socialists

How Colleges Produce Socialists - WSJ
When your first brush with adulthood involves endless consumption and no cost, it gives you the wrong idea of how the world works.

What’s behind the craze for socialism among young people? The New York Times, focusing on the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York membership surge, offers the conventional view: that it is fueled predominantly by “frustration with the economy” and the desire for a social safety net. The same report notes that the DSA member base has become younger and more white-collar, with its greatest appeal to college-educated urban dwellers.

Why college students? The usual assumption is that professors are indoctrinating students, but that’s too simple. The campus itself is a powerful factor.

When students arrive in college, they encounter a vague sense of freedom. What they often do not realize is how controlled their campus experience is. Universities operate as a closed economy: centrally administered, collectively resourced, carefully controlled by administrators who hope their plans aid retention efforts.

Over the past several decades, the college campus has morphed into a comprehensive residential and lifestyle provider. Beginning in the 1990s, when colleges started competing more aggressively for larger enrollment numbers, investing in student life became a way to recruit students. Expanded student unions, more-comfortable residence halls, larger recreation centers, campus programming offices and improved dining choices became the norm.

By the early 2000s, colleges faced an “amenities arms race.” Rec centers were revamped with climbing walls and lazy rivers; dorms gave way to apartment lofts with expansive lounges; campus coffee bars were established with national brands.

The upgrading of amenities wasn’t only a matter of physical adjustments. Administrators, aware that nonacademic factors can influence educational outcomes, sought to provide full-scale support not only to ensure graduation (tutoring and writing centers) but also personal growth (wellness and DEI programming). Specialized administrative units and support services grew quickly, outpacing academic departments. Critics have argued that this growing array of services contributes to rising college costs and an emphasis on comforts and conveniences rather than educational value.

This transformation has been especially pronounced at America’s wealthiest and most selective colleges and universities. At elite institutions, students enter a nearly self-contained community. They ride campus buses without paying a fare. They enter expansive recreation centers without a membership card. They attend concerts, meet career coaches, reserve study rooms, download software, join student organizations, and participate in countless campus activities without ever reaching for a wallet.

None of these services are free. Their costs are embedded in tuition and fees, endowment income, donor support and government funding. Yet, because students rarely confront a price at the point of use, they experience consumption without consequence or even comparison.

The dining hall is a perfect example: The student’s economic background is invisible as everyone eats from the same options available in the food court. There is no price signal, and a student who eats three plates of pasta and a bowl of soft-serve ice cream has the same meal plan as one who has a salad and a glass of water.

Students’ insulation from costs and price signals has important consequences. As Friedrich Hayek emphasized, prices communicate information and make trade-offs visible. They reveal scarcity and coordinate countless individual decisions across society. When prices are bundled or obscured, consumers—in this case students—encounter fewer day-to-day reminders of opportunity costs or the economic realities that accompany virtually every decision in ordinary life. All-inclusive services inevitably cultivate different economic habits than an environment in which individuals routinely weigh costs, compare alternatives, and make purchasing decisions.

For many 18-year-olds, college is the first large institution they experience independently from their families. Spending four formative years in a community where hundreds of services are collectively financed and individually consumed can shape assumptions about how institutions function and how resources should be allocated. As institutional economist Douglass North argued, institutions shape the “rules of the game” by influencing the mental models people use to interpret the world. Four years in a planned and bundled environment can leave a lasting impression of what is normal, which graduates carry over into the “real world.”

The question isn’t whether universities should provide such services. It is how living in such an environment shapes a generation’s understanding of markets, institutions and economic expectations.

If transportation is universally available without fares on campus, it may seem natural to ask why urban transportation doesn’t function similarly. If counseling services and mindfulness programs are readily available in college, paid time off for mental health may seem like a reasonable expectation in the workplace. If fitness centers, technology services, entertainment options and countless other amenities appear to operate without cost, comprehensive public provision elsewhere may seem practical.

When the costs of collectively provided goods are invisible, the investments required to sustain them are easy to overlook. The result is an environment where consumption is highly visible while production and financing remain in the background.

That helps explain why politicians advocating expansive government programs often find receptive audiences among younger, college-educated voters. A cohort raised on all-you-can-eat meal plans, campus shuttles and bundled student services may be evaluating public policy through the only economic model they have ever personally experienced. Viewed through that lens, it becomes easier to understand why proposals such as city-run grocery stores and fare-free public transit have gained traction among younger voters, including those who supported New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

A greater willingness to rely on government intervention in economic affairs isn’t confined to the political left. Today’s political leaders increasingly look first to large institutions to coordinate solutions. Whether the proposal involves government-supported family benefits, universal child care, industrial policy, subsidized housing or publicly funded college, the common thread is confidence that centralized institutions can effectively organize resources on behalf of citizens.

Vice President JD Vance has openly criticized laissez-faire capitalism and in one recent interview emphasized access, meaning and belonging in language that echoes themes often heard on elite college campuses. According to Mr. Vance, people should aim to find their purpose and a sense of contribution that extends beyond economic efficiency. He scoffs at the idea of earning a living in a cubicle.

That emphasis on community and institutional belonging raises an interesting question about where such assumptions are cultivated. At Yale Law School, where Mr. Vance studied from 2010 through 2013 with practically a full ride, students occupied one of the most architecturally distinguished academic environments in the country. The Sterling Law Building was designed to evoke England’s historic Inns of Court, complete with soaring stone archways, stained-glass windows, carved oak interiors, tranquil courtyards, and communal spaces intended to foster scholarly community. Students had access to the Lillian Goldman Law Library, one of the world’s premier collections, along with an on-site dining hall, Café Law, plus student lounges, meditation spaces and the Payne Whitney Gymnasium, a recreation complex spanning more than a dozen acres with swimming pools, squash courts, basketball courts, climbing facilities, fitness studios and hundreds of pieces of exercise equipment. Most of these amenities were simply part of campus life.

It’s worth considering whether elite campus environments normalize an organizational model that many of today’s millennial political leaders seek to replicate through public policy.

Mr. Mamdani’s undergraduate experience at Maine’s Bowdoin College (2010-14) is another example. Bowdoin consistently ranks among the nation’s finest residential colleges, with dining services that receive national recognition for quality and variety. Every student is issued a MacBook Pro, iPad and Apple Pencil, making cutting-edge technology an assumed component of the educational experience rather than a personal purchasing decision. The Bowdoin Outing Club, one of the oldest collegiate outdoor programs in the country, organizes more than 150 trips each year, providing equipment, transportation, guides, and leadership training at little or no additional cost to participants. Students ski at the college’s Nordic center, skate at the Sidney J. Watson Arena, and borrow outdoor equipment from an extensive gear library. They even stay in a college-owned cabin along the Appalachian Trail.

The point isn’t that either Mr. Vance or Mr. Mamdani supports particular policies because of the amenities he experienced in college. It is that these environments may foster a blinkered way of thinking about institutions, social provision and what constitutes a normal standard of living.

Given these arrangements, is it any wonder that many graduates experience sticker shock on entering adult life? Grocery bills, utility payments, security deposits, transportation, internet service, gym memberships and countless other expenses suddenly become explicit rather than bundled. What many describe as an “affordability crisis” may partly reflect the shock of moving from a bundled institutional economy for which someone else usually pays to an unbundled market economy in which one has to earn his own keep. That makes adulthood feel less like independence and more like an abrupt transition into a harsh world of trade-offs.

The irony is striking. America’s leading universities devote enormous effort to preparing graduates for participation in a dynamic market economy, yet daily campus life is one of the least market-oriented environments in the world.

This doesn’t mean students inevitably leave campus embracing socialist politics. But institutions teach lessons beyond their formal curriculum. If we want to understand why a generation increasingly looks to large organizations to solve complex social problems, we should spend less time scrutinizing classroom lectures and more time examining the economic environment students inhabit every day. The most influential economics lesson many students receive may come from the institutional design of the university. Before blaming the professors, consider the campus.