Peter Turchin has mentioned that when elite competition increases and life crappifies for the masses, university enrollment increases. So, this isn't so surprising.
I do wonder how the smaller cohort sizes will play into this, though. We're probably very close to the ceiling of how many people (relative to cohort size) can enroll in university, given the distribution of talents and inclinations. As the number of young people drops, so will the number of students. But as the number of young people drops, you can expect employers to compete more vigorously for the few who are there, resulting in a smaller percentage of a smaller cohort attending university. Probably.
The one thing that bothers me, though, is that human organizations are so bad at contracting in a rational manner. For instance, I read somewhere recently that the number of newly-minted history PhDs (in the United States, I believe) had shrunk by something like 30% compared to about a decade ago. "Good news! They were producing way too many of those." That's what I thought (and still think). The problem is that, apparently, pre-modern history is in free fall. The few academic history positions that remain are almost exclusively for the post-1500 (and mostly post-1800) period. And the graduate students are overwhelmingly in modern history. Give it a generation, and most major universities won't have anyone with any serious expertise in anything older than a couple of centuries.
[Mind you, I'm not a historian or anything remotely related. This is just something I read about on the Internet. Our host may know more.]
Smaller cohort sizes compound the problem you outlined citing Turchin; many more will try to get into those programs that 'pay off' (which, oddly enough, is Business Administration in Norway, i.e., something that will quite certainly *not* add much, if any, benefit to its graduates).
In parasocialistic countries like in the North, the secondary school system (which all other OSCE 'experts™' laud as exemplary) massively compounds the problem as it, on the one hand, pretends to be a 'one-size-fits-all' model, i.e., all kids go to the same state schools irrespective of abilities, interests, etc. (where 'ability groups'--they use colour codes red-yellow-green here--are then used to re-introduce differences. It's basically 'common core' from K-13. On the other hand, this means everyone has the right to go to senior high and, by virtue of 'graduating' (in a mostly grade-free environment), the right to attend university. The consequence of both distortions is that a degree doesn't tell an employer much, if anything, about any graduates' abilities and competences.
Hence, one may expect a shift--like the one you relate about history PhDs in the US (I don't know these data)--but the big question is, I'd rather argue, not so much the quantity but the place of training: a few years ago, I gave a couple of talks at one of the less-prestigious state universities (undergraduate training only) where a friend taught; she had a PhD from a fancy-name place, and the point here is that--in History we're now experiencing the same de facto centralisation Law or Economics has gone through in the past generation: in the latter two fields, 3 out of 4 faculty positions are now going to Ivy League-trained (sic) PhDs, and the social sciences and humanities are now doing the same.
As to the pre-modern/pre-revolutionary issue, well, that's a point very well taken by me; I work on, and teach, on precisely this period (it's called the 'early modern' era with start and end dates, of course, varying from region to context, but 1500-1800 is a pretty useful fill-in), and the problem you outline--loss of competence in a few decades--is very pertinent (it's also getting increasingly hard to obtain a permanent position in these and 'older' fields, such as mediaeval or ancient history). Part of this is due to shifting geopolitics: after WW2, 'recent' European history looked, well, 'bleak' and 'bad', hence recourse to a seemingly 'better' past was politically encouraged; as regards Russian/Soviet Studies, well, that only really took off after WW2 (for obvious reasons), and in the US this is centralised at Harvard, Columbia, and the U of Toronto (sorry Canadians, you're vassals like us Europeans), but esp. the Harriman Institute (which was founded under another name in 1947) was, and continues to serve as, the premier place for every anti-Soviet (crackpot) in the US, ranging from old aristocrats to White Russians to 'non-conformist' lefties; as long as one was anti-Moscow/Russian/Soviet, that would do just fine. Needless to say, these institutions are currently overwhelmed with/by 'friends of Ukraine', for the same reasons I cited above.
I do recall an application to a US university in 2016 or 2017; the college was on the West Coast in California (God, I'm so glad I didn't get there), where I was told, informally, that while the position was in 'Western European Early Modern History,' my focus on 'Austria' and 'Venice' was not 'good /Western enough' to make it past the higher ups in the food chain. If you look closely at what colleges are looking for, esp. along the West Coast, it's virtually all about 'China'.
You write: 'Give it a generation, and most major universities won't have anyone with any serious expertise in anything older than a couple of centuries.'
We're already there, but I suspect we're in about the same age bracket (I'm 42), which means 'we' had some broader training than school-aged children get today. I recall English from grade 5 (eight years), Latin from grade 7 (six years), and French from grade 9 (four years), and on top of it, I took Italian as an elective in grade 10 (three years). If you're lucky today, people learn English in school and perhaps--and increasingly big 'if'--one more language.
Same with history (perhaps 1 or 2 hours a week these days), but, I kid you not, my 10yo is now 'taught' about 'v-logging' in 4th grade, and reading assignments talk about putting on a swimsuit in November to 'make a Youtube video'.
I doubt this crapification will take 'generations' to accomplish, for it began a generation ago.
Not sure i understand your comment about studying business administration in Norway not adding a benefit to the degree holder: it’s consistently one of the professions with the highest average salaries, probably as much as lawyers, doctors and engineers:
As I mentioned above, I should have explained myself a wee bit more clearer, and I apologise for the 'inside baseball' aspects.
As to your comment, I don't mean to indicate that, in the short-to-medium term, an MBA doesn't offer benefits, with the average salary clearly being one indicator thereof--as well as of the massive depreciation of the Norwegian Crown (and 'inflation', i.e., a massive increase in the money supply, as well).
As an aside, don't be 'fooled' by averages, for the median salary is much more indicative: in the public sector, the median salary for MBAs is 839K, in the private sector it is 950K (for international readers: divide by 10 to arrive at a fair approximation of its US$ or Euro equivalents). This means that half (!!!) of all MBAs earn less than that, and if you're a rather (below) average business admin. student, that's where most will end up.
My argument, such as it is, is a different one, though: as some fields contract (e.g., in the humanities), and smaller cohorts attend/graduate from university, these discrepancies both within certain disciplines and industries will accentuate. More and more people will aspire to become MBAs, to stick with the example you cite, to end up in the top-tier of the salary range, which, of course, will reduce wages eventually and put massive pressures on those in the lower ranks. There is, in other words, quite an obvious 'marginal utility' to such credentials, 'even' in disciplines/industries that pay relatively well.
On top of it, not all jobs are 'equal', and since you also cite medical doctors, let's just look at the 'GP crisis' (fastlegekrise): in my neck of the woods outside 'the cities', the municipality employs a temp GP (vikar) from Sweden. He's a nice guy, drives a huge SUV, and makes I don't know how much money when he's here. The same qualification, though, is worth way less, relatively speaking, in, say, Oslo, Bergen, or Stavanger.
In my almost 4 years in Norway, I've only encountered one teacher-student who, although from Bergen, considers moving into the special economic zone created in the North (see https://fackel.substack.com/p/norwegian-births-in-2023-up-due-to) because of lower taxes, higher subsidies, and an easy entry into the job market. The situation is very different for students/future graduates in cities, such as Oslo, Bergen, or Stavanger.
Oh, wait! I think I understand what you mean by smaller cohorts compounding the problem! So, you have fewer prospective students, while all the study programs are desperate to keep enrollment numbers steady or growing. Some programs (those perceived as lucrative, correctly or incorrectly) get to keep their students, but with lower requirements because with smaller cohorts, they have to admit students of lower ability in order to keep the absolute numbers up. Meanwhile, the other fields contract catastrophically. And maybe they needed to contract, but not to that extent! If you wish to rebuild the gutted fields, it's not so easy. Nothing's impossible, of course, but it simply takes time (and investment) to rebuild lost expertise.
Bingo--the entire higher education section has been turned into a kind of 'diploma mill' due to how the funding streams 'work': much like in the health care sector, apart from 'basic funding', faculties and departments are allocated funding on the basis of two metrics: student enrolment and student performance (credits/diplomas 'produced').
Once enrolment numbers go down, massive pressure is placed on faculty to increase credit/diploma production (which in turn puts massive downward pressure on requirements and standards).
On top of what you described--'some programs…get to keep their students…other fields contract catastrophically'--the way the funding streams 'work' you'd get massive inter-departmental/faculty competition for 'students' (enrolment), in the hope to stave off a contraction of the student population and hence of the number of credits 'produced' each year.
So, it's not 'just' contraction, but with a vengeance. In the meantime, a lot of expertise, such as it exists, is lost due to cancelled or delayed replacements, shifting hiring priorities (e.g., 'China', like: all of of it, instead of the European middle ages).
In addition, you'd also see massive downward competition with other universities and colleges, for if college A reduces standards, places B trough Z must do so likewise to avoid haemorrhaging students = funding to place A.
Basically, the only way to try to do something about this--is to act counter-cyclically, i.e., raise standards, proactively reduce the number of students to make it more attractive for high-potential people to come to place A. So far, no-one among those higher up in the food chain are listening; in Norway, this issue is compounded massively by the para-ideological belief that we're all equal (we might be created so, but in reality, we all have different interests, talents, etc.). None of these nuances apply here.
So, we'll see more and more cut-through, standard-depressing activism to treat the symptom; the Norwegian Finance Minister, last year, said something like, 'we'll run out of people long before we'll run out of money', hence nothing will be done for the foreseeable time.
You write: 'maybe they needed to contract, but not to that extent! If you wish to rebuild the gutted fields, it's not so easy. Nothing's impossible, of course, but it simply takes time (and investment) to rebuild lost expertise.'
Hmm. I don't see how smaller cohort sizes would compound the problem. If labor is in short supply, then employers cannot afford to be quite so picky about whom they hire. If you have more job candidates than you know what to do with, then you come up with job requirements such as "a bachelor's degree and the ability to lift 50 lb." If workers are hard to get, then you are probably going to modify that to "the ability to read labels on boxes and the ability to lift 50 lb." Meanwhile, you probably have to pay more than you used to. If the job market adjusts in this way, then presumably, credential seeking behavior will adjust as well.
About expertise: I was talking about university faculty, not elementary schools. :-) Granted, tomorrow's university professors are today's elementary school children. Yes, you and I are close in age. My history education was quite poor, though, I am sad to say. I started school (in Serbia) just shortly before the Yugoslav wars began. Well, these wars and all the rest of it led to repeated modifications in the history curriculum and to hastily written textbooks. Experts will talk about political biases in those textbooks, but for me as a student, the main problem was that they were poorly written and so nothing stuck. A bunch of factoids thrown together, effortfully memorized to get that grade, and then forgotten very quickly. So, I don't think I got particularly indoctrinated. Mostly, I was left clueless. [Speaking of which: those parents who are currently freaking out about their children being indoctrinated in school should probably worry more about the fact that their children are being left clueless. If my experience is anything to go by.] Fun fact: when I was in high school, I got ahold of an American history textbook, used in (some) American schools. I went through it one summer, did all the exercises, and to this day, I know American history better than Serbian history. Turns out that when you pit 12 years of Serbian schools against one reasonably written textbook, the textbook wins.
Interesting stuff about Russian, btw. For me, in particular, because I learned Russian at one of the places that you mention. :-P No degree in Russian, mind you. I just took Russian classes for fun while working on an advanced degree in a STEM field (circa 2010). I don't recall anything particularly crack-potty, but also, none of my classes were on politics or history (some were on literature, though). The main thing that struck me was that the department seemed so old. By which I mean: the faculty members were quite old. The three permanent faculty members who taught me were all in their 60s (and not necessarily early 60s!). One sadly died not too long after I graduated (he was in his mid-70s by then), another one retired right around the same time, and the third one is still going, though given when she graduated from university, she should be well into her 70s by now. Also, judging by their current course offerings, they don't seem to be teaching nearly as many advanced classes now (the kinds that require a high level of Russian); and the advanced classes (not in translation) that are still being taught are all being taught by that professor in her 70s! So, I wonder if Russian studies are also in free fall(?). Maybe I caught the last Russian train, so to speak, and what I got is not available anymore.
However, concerning languages in primary/secondary school: look, young people today have better foreign language skills than the older generations. Oh, sure, it's rare to find a young person who speaks a foreign language other than English (unless it's an immigrant). But for the older generation, it's not so easy to find people who speak any foreign language at all. Having French (or what have you) in school is very different from actually speaking French. Fun fact: when I moved to the Czech Republic (I had only just started learning Czech), I would try to communicate with people in English (obviously). Sometimes that worked just fine, but sometimes they would say they couldn't speak English because they had Russian in school (they would say that in Czech, and my Czech was just good enough to understand that). So, I'd try speaking Russian with them. Crickets. Those Czechs who blame Russian for their inability to speak English cannot actually speak Russian.
I should have been more precise: I didn't mean to suggest faculty at those fancy-name places are bad or anything; they are, as far as I can tell, very lovely people.
The Russophobes congregate not so much in the 'official' programs but 'on the margins', e.g., 'cultural events', such as exhibitions, book talks, and the like. Many non-academic staffers also hail from former Soviet minorities and/or otherwise have very interesting personal histories (e.g., Jews being stateless in the early 1990s as no 'successor state' would grant them citizenship) and who would often volunteer their after-hours to put up these events…
We should have a separate debate about the piss-poor quality of textbooks, and here, there's not that much difference between 'here' and 'there'; the main issue often are prices and material (esp. pictures) for which the publisher already holds the copyright. And then there's the whole issue of the text…
As to language instruction, well, in most Eastern European countries Russian was replaced by English in/around 1990…
"As to language instruction, well, in most Eastern European countries Russian was replaced by English in/around 1990..."
Yes, but my point is that it doesn't really matter what language they were taught before 1990: they didn't learn anything in any case! Well, most of them.
Peter Turchin has mentioned that when elite competition increases and life crappifies for the masses, university enrollment increases. So, this isn't so surprising.
I do wonder how the smaller cohort sizes will play into this, though. We're probably very close to the ceiling of how many people (relative to cohort size) can enroll in university, given the distribution of talents and inclinations. As the number of young people drops, so will the number of students. But as the number of young people drops, you can expect employers to compete more vigorously for the few who are there, resulting in a smaller percentage of a smaller cohort attending university. Probably.
The one thing that bothers me, though, is that human organizations are so bad at contracting in a rational manner. For instance, I read somewhere recently that the number of newly-minted history PhDs (in the United States, I believe) had shrunk by something like 30% compared to about a decade ago. "Good news! They were producing way too many of those." That's what I thought (and still think). The problem is that, apparently, pre-modern history is in free fall. The few academic history positions that remain are almost exclusively for the post-1500 (and mostly post-1800) period. And the graduate students are overwhelmingly in modern history. Give it a generation, and most major universities won't have anyone with any serious expertise in anything older than a couple of centuries.
[Mind you, I'm not a historian or anything remotely related. This is just something I read about on the Internet. Our host may know more.]
Smaller cohort sizes compound the problem you outlined citing Turchin; many more will try to get into those programs that 'pay off' (which, oddly enough, is Business Administration in Norway, i.e., something that will quite certainly *not* add much, if any, benefit to its graduates).
In parasocialistic countries like in the North, the secondary school system (which all other OSCE 'experts™' laud as exemplary) massively compounds the problem as it, on the one hand, pretends to be a 'one-size-fits-all' model, i.e., all kids go to the same state schools irrespective of abilities, interests, etc. (where 'ability groups'--they use colour codes red-yellow-green here--are then used to re-introduce differences. It's basically 'common core' from K-13. On the other hand, this means everyone has the right to go to senior high and, by virtue of 'graduating' (in a mostly grade-free environment), the right to attend university. The consequence of both distortions is that a degree doesn't tell an employer much, if anything, about any graduates' abilities and competences.
Hence, one may expect a shift--like the one you relate about history PhDs in the US (I don't know these data)--but the big question is, I'd rather argue, not so much the quantity but the place of training: a few years ago, I gave a couple of talks at one of the less-prestigious state universities (undergraduate training only) where a friend taught; she had a PhD from a fancy-name place, and the point here is that--in History we're now experiencing the same de facto centralisation Law or Economics has gone through in the past generation: in the latter two fields, 3 out of 4 faculty positions are now going to Ivy League-trained (sic) PhDs, and the social sciences and humanities are now doing the same.
As to the pre-modern/pre-revolutionary issue, well, that's a point very well taken by me; I work on, and teach, on precisely this period (it's called the 'early modern' era with start and end dates, of course, varying from region to context, but 1500-1800 is a pretty useful fill-in), and the problem you outline--loss of competence in a few decades--is very pertinent (it's also getting increasingly hard to obtain a permanent position in these and 'older' fields, such as mediaeval or ancient history). Part of this is due to shifting geopolitics: after WW2, 'recent' European history looked, well, 'bleak' and 'bad', hence recourse to a seemingly 'better' past was politically encouraged; as regards Russian/Soviet Studies, well, that only really took off after WW2 (for obvious reasons), and in the US this is centralised at Harvard, Columbia, and the U of Toronto (sorry Canadians, you're vassals like us Europeans), but esp. the Harriman Institute (which was founded under another name in 1947) was, and continues to serve as, the premier place for every anti-Soviet (crackpot) in the US, ranging from old aristocrats to White Russians to 'non-conformist' lefties; as long as one was anti-Moscow/Russian/Soviet, that would do just fine. Needless to say, these institutions are currently overwhelmed with/by 'friends of Ukraine', for the same reasons I cited above.
I do recall an application to a US university in 2016 or 2017; the college was on the West Coast in California (God, I'm so glad I didn't get there), where I was told, informally, that while the position was in 'Western European Early Modern History,' my focus on 'Austria' and 'Venice' was not 'good /Western enough' to make it past the higher ups in the food chain. If you look closely at what colleges are looking for, esp. along the West Coast, it's virtually all about 'China'.
You write: 'Give it a generation, and most major universities won't have anyone with any serious expertise in anything older than a couple of centuries.'
We're already there, but I suspect we're in about the same age bracket (I'm 42), which means 'we' had some broader training than school-aged children get today. I recall English from grade 5 (eight years), Latin from grade 7 (six years), and French from grade 9 (four years), and on top of it, I took Italian as an elective in grade 10 (three years). If you're lucky today, people learn English in school and perhaps--and increasingly big 'if'--one more language.
Same with history (perhaps 1 or 2 hours a week these days), but, I kid you not, my 10yo is now 'taught' about 'v-logging' in 4th grade, and reading assignments talk about putting on a swimsuit in November to 'make a Youtube video'.
I doubt this crapification will take 'generations' to accomplish, for it began a generation ago.
Not sure i understand your comment about studying business administration in Norway not adding a benefit to the degree holder: it’s consistently one of the professions with the highest average salaries, probably as much as lawyers, doctors and engineers:
https://nye.econa.no/medlemsfordeler/lonn/snittlonnen-har-passert-en-million/
As I mentioned above, I should have explained myself a wee bit more clearer, and I apologise for the 'inside baseball' aspects.
As to your comment, I don't mean to indicate that, in the short-to-medium term, an MBA doesn't offer benefits, with the average salary clearly being one indicator thereof--as well as of the massive depreciation of the Norwegian Crown (and 'inflation', i.e., a massive increase in the money supply, as well).
As an aside, don't be 'fooled' by averages, for the median salary is much more indicative: in the public sector, the median salary for MBAs is 839K, in the private sector it is 950K (for international readers: divide by 10 to arrive at a fair approximation of its US$ or Euro equivalents). This means that half (!!!) of all MBAs earn less than that, and if you're a rather (below) average business admin. student, that's where most will end up.
My argument, such as it is, is a different one, though: as some fields contract (e.g., in the humanities), and smaller cohorts attend/graduate from university, these discrepancies both within certain disciplines and industries will accentuate. More and more people will aspire to become MBAs, to stick with the example you cite, to end up in the top-tier of the salary range, which, of course, will reduce wages eventually and put massive pressures on those in the lower ranks. There is, in other words, quite an obvious 'marginal utility' to such credentials, 'even' in disciplines/industries that pay relatively well.
On top of it, not all jobs are 'equal', and since you also cite medical doctors, let's just look at the 'GP crisis' (fastlegekrise): in my neck of the woods outside 'the cities', the municipality employs a temp GP (vikar) from Sweden. He's a nice guy, drives a huge SUV, and makes I don't know how much money when he's here. The same qualification, though, is worth way less, relatively speaking, in, say, Oslo, Bergen, or Stavanger.
In my almost 4 years in Norway, I've only encountered one teacher-student who, although from Bergen, considers moving into the special economic zone created in the North (see https://fackel.substack.com/p/norwegian-births-in-2023-up-due-to) because of lower taxes, higher subsidies, and an easy entry into the job market. The situation is very different for students/future graduates in cities, such as Oslo, Bergen, or Stavanger.
Oh, wait! I think I understand what you mean by smaller cohorts compounding the problem! So, you have fewer prospective students, while all the study programs are desperate to keep enrollment numbers steady or growing. Some programs (those perceived as lucrative, correctly or incorrectly) get to keep their students, but with lower requirements because with smaller cohorts, they have to admit students of lower ability in order to keep the absolute numbers up. Meanwhile, the other fields contract catastrophically. And maybe they needed to contract, but not to that extent! If you wish to rebuild the gutted fields, it's not so easy. Nothing's impossible, of course, but it simply takes time (and investment) to rebuild lost expertise.
Bingo--the entire higher education section has been turned into a kind of 'diploma mill' due to how the funding streams 'work': much like in the health care sector, apart from 'basic funding', faculties and departments are allocated funding on the basis of two metrics: student enrolment and student performance (credits/diplomas 'produced').
Once enrolment numbers go down, massive pressure is placed on faculty to increase credit/diploma production (which in turn puts massive downward pressure on requirements and standards).
On top of what you described--'some programs…get to keep their students…other fields contract catastrophically'--the way the funding streams 'work' you'd get massive inter-departmental/faculty competition for 'students' (enrolment), in the hope to stave off a contraction of the student population and hence of the number of credits 'produced' each year.
So, it's not 'just' contraction, but with a vengeance. In the meantime, a lot of expertise, such as it exists, is lost due to cancelled or delayed replacements, shifting hiring priorities (e.g., 'China', like: all of of it, instead of the European middle ages).
In addition, you'd also see massive downward competition with other universities and colleges, for if college A reduces standards, places B trough Z must do so likewise to avoid haemorrhaging students = funding to place A.
Basically, the only way to try to do something about this--is to act counter-cyclically, i.e., raise standards, proactively reduce the number of students to make it more attractive for high-potential people to come to place A. So far, no-one among those higher up in the food chain are listening; in Norway, this issue is compounded massively by the para-ideological belief that we're all equal (we might be created so, but in reality, we all have different interests, talents, etc.). None of these nuances apply here.
So, we'll see more and more cut-through, standard-depressing activism to treat the symptom; the Norwegian Finance Minister, last year, said something like, 'we'll run out of people long before we'll run out of money', hence nothing will be done for the foreseeable time.
You write: 'maybe they needed to contract, but not to that extent! If you wish to rebuild the gutted fields, it's not so easy. Nothing's impossible, of course, but it simply takes time (and investment) to rebuild lost expertise.'
True words.
Hmm. I don't see how smaller cohort sizes would compound the problem. If labor is in short supply, then employers cannot afford to be quite so picky about whom they hire. If you have more job candidates than you know what to do with, then you come up with job requirements such as "a bachelor's degree and the ability to lift 50 lb." If workers are hard to get, then you are probably going to modify that to "the ability to read labels on boxes and the ability to lift 50 lb." Meanwhile, you probably have to pay more than you used to. If the job market adjusts in this way, then presumably, credential seeking behavior will adjust as well.
About expertise: I was talking about university faculty, not elementary schools. :-) Granted, tomorrow's university professors are today's elementary school children. Yes, you and I are close in age. My history education was quite poor, though, I am sad to say. I started school (in Serbia) just shortly before the Yugoslav wars began. Well, these wars and all the rest of it led to repeated modifications in the history curriculum and to hastily written textbooks. Experts will talk about political biases in those textbooks, but for me as a student, the main problem was that they were poorly written and so nothing stuck. A bunch of factoids thrown together, effortfully memorized to get that grade, and then forgotten very quickly. So, I don't think I got particularly indoctrinated. Mostly, I was left clueless. [Speaking of which: those parents who are currently freaking out about their children being indoctrinated in school should probably worry more about the fact that their children are being left clueless. If my experience is anything to go by.] Fun fact: when I was in high school, I got ahold of an American history textbook, used in (some) American schools. I went through it one summer, did all the exercises, and to this day, I know American history better than Serbian history. Turns out that when you pit 12 years of Serbian schools against one reasonably written textbook, the textbook wins.
Interesting stuff about Russian, btw. For me, in particular, because I learned Russian at one of the places that you mention. :-P No degree in Russian, mind you. I just took Russian classes for fun while working on an advanced degree in a STEM field (circa 2010). I don't recall anything particularly crack-potty, but also, none of my classes were on politics or history (some were on literature, though). The main thing that struck me was that the department seemed so old. By which I mean: the faculty members were quite old. The three permanent faculty members who taught me were all in their 60s (and not necessarily early 60s!). One sadly died not too long after I graduated (he was in his mid-70s by then), another one retired right around the same time, and the third one is still going, though given when she graduated from university, she should be well into her 70s by now. Also, judging by their current course offerings, they don't seem to be teaching nearly as many advanced classes now (the kinds that require a high level of Russian); and the advanced classes (not in translation) that are still being taught are all being taught by that professor in her 70s! So, I wonder if Russian studies are also in free fall(?). Maybe I caught the last Russian train, so to speak, and what I got is not available anymore.
However, concerning languages in primary/secondary school: look, young people today have better foreign language skills than the older generations. Oh, sure, it's rare to find a young person who speaks a foreign language other than English (unless it's an immigrant). But for the older generation, it's not so easy to find people who speak any foreign language at all. Having French (or what have you) in school is very different from actually speaking French. Fun fact: when I moved to the Czech Republic (I had only just started learning Czech), I would try to communicate with people in English (obviously). Sometimes that worked just fine, but sometimes they would say they couldn't speak English because they had Russian in school (they would say that in Czech, and my Czech was just good enough to understand that). So, I'd try speaking Russian with them. Crickets. Those Czechs who blame Russian for their inability to speak English cannot actually speak Russian.
I should have been more precise: I didn't mean to suggest faculty at those fancy-name places are bad or anything; they are, as far as I can tell, very lovely people.
The Russophobes congregate not so much in the 'official' programs but 'on the margins', e.g., 'cultural events', such as exhibitions, book talks, and the like. Many non-academic staffers also hail from former Soviet minorities and/or otherwise have very interesting personal histories (e.g., Jews being stateless in the early 1990s as no 'successor state' would grant them citizenship) and who would often volunteer their after-hours to put up these events…
We should have a separate debate about the piss-poor quality of textbooks, and here, there's not that much difference between 'here' and 'there'; the main issue often are prices and material (esp. pictures) for which the publisher already holds the copyright. And then there's the whole issue of the text…
As to language instruction, well, in most Eastern European countries Russian was replaced by English in/around 1990…
There's another thing
"As to language instruction, well, in most Eastern European countries Russian was replaced by English in/around 1990..."
Yes, but my point is that it doesn't really matter what language they were taught before 1990: they didn't learn anything in any case! Well, most of them.