As is often the case, marlowe1’s post seems very reductive to me, in all sorts of dimensions. The difference between the student bodies and educational philosophies of the University of Chicago and many of its peers are of degree at most (and not so many degrees), not kind.
They all have a diverse range of students who, like intelligent people since the dawn of time, are balancing intellectual curiosity and development, non-intellectual personal ambitions, and survival needs. They all have faculty and administrators who believe in liberal arts education, shared intellectual culture, critical thinking, and the Life of the Mind.
None of them – not the students, the faculty, the bureaucrats, or the personified institutions – is unaware that those intellectual and educational values have historically proven to have monetary value in society outside the university. Or that such correspondence is largely responsible for the survival (and much more than survival, thriving) of their universities over the past century.
Markovits has spent a lot more time at Yale recently than I have, but what he describes sounds nothing like the experience and outlook of the kids I know well who have studied there in the past decade. What he describes sounds a lot more like Harvard or Wharton, but I know that even in those hotbeds of careerism there is at the very least a sizable subculture of Life-of-the-Mind types. And Chicago is hardly free of careerists. Last fall, over 1/3 of undergraduates with a declared major were majoring in Economics or Computer Science. I am certain that some of them were in those fields purely out of intellectual interest, but I’m not willing to believe that those subjects are so intellectually interesting as to crowd out everything else without a peek at postgraduate employment outcomes. (Add in Biology and Biochem, which must have a pre-med or two hundred, and you are looking at about 45% of students .)
By the way, I don’t think anything Markovits writes about Yale, or anyone writes about Chicago, has much of anything to do with what marlowe1 calls “the dominant culture.” There isn’t one dominant culture these days, but the variety of cultures vying for dominance pretty much boxes out the culture of elitist liberal arts education entirely. As far as I can tell, outside of College Confidential no one is clamoring for more Mandarins.
As for next fall – Chicago may be welcoming back everyone, but it is only housing about 33%. Harvard will be housing 40%. Chicago says that about 10% of classes will have a completely optional in-person component; Harvard says that everything will be remote. The big difference between the two, as far as I can tell, is that Chicago only ever housed about 50% of its undergraduates, while Harvard housed about 98%. Despite Boyer’s long-term goal to increase on-campus housing, the actual number of official housing slots at Chicago has barely kept up with the increase in enrollment (if that). There is still a substantial supply of off-campus student-appropriate housing within walking distance of the Reg (which of course isn’t open). The same just isn’t true of Harvard. Cambridge can’t possibly absorb additional thousands of Harvard undergraduates at reasonable prices in safe conditions.
In other words, it’s not so much that Harvard cares less about its undergraduates than Chicago. It’s more like two of the main factors which have unquestionably given Harvard a recruiting advantage over Chicago – the vastly greater commitment of resources it made to undergraduate quality of life over the past century, and its ritzier home community – turn out to be millstones around its neck in the Year of the Plague. So be it. I think both are acknowledging that they will not be providing the undergraduate experience they aspire to provide this fall. Neither is offering any price cuts because of that. Harvard is a bit more effusive than Chicago in promising financial aid adjustments and helping students use leaves and summer terms to restructure/rescue some of the college experience everyone hoped they would have.
All of that said (and at unnecessary length) . . . I agree with marlowe1 that one hopeful aspect of this situation may be to flatten young people’s career curves a bit, and possibly even to decrease the differences in compensation and time demands. Which will largely be financed by smooshing whatever remains of we boomers’ careers. Whether that translates into re-ascendance of liberal arts education or not . . . that’s harder to predict comfortably, although I certainly hope so.