Seeing Like a State University

How to Understand the Coming Collapse

James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale UP, 1998) is everyone’s favorite book about the failure of centralized planning and grand designs. Why did so many well-intentioned, expertly engineered “reforms” around the world over the last 150 years, from Prussian “scientific forest management” to Soviet collectivization to planned cities nobody wants to live in, fail disastrously? Why is central planning blind to the logical outcome of imposing a grid on a messy world, whether ecological collapse, “forest death,” or sterile wasteland? Nature always fights back, Scott shows. Not everything can be controlled and measured.

Scott labels the impulse behind these grandiose and utopian projects “high modernism,” an abiding faith that rational design plus political strength can improve any human or natural system. He argues that the State – and by extension any big efficiency-minded organization – has no interest in the rich and complex organism it oversees. It doesn’t care about organic relationships, cross-pollination, and folkways. Rather, the fertile inefficiency of the existing structure is a gold mine for the optimizer who sees immediate returns on making crooked paths straight. Maximizing returns is the logic of the planner.

The perils of State planning Scott indicts are uncannily descriptive of public higher education today, collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, as Neo-Leninist systems seeking to turn out a bourgeois product in the age of AI. I was surprised nobody had yet commandeered my title “Seeing Like a State University.”¹

Scott’s book struck a nerve in the tech world, many of whom were first introduced to Seeing Like a State in 2010 in an influential blog post by Venkatesh Rao, who summed up what Scott described as the “authoritarian high modernist recipe for failure” thus:

•Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
•Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
•Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
 •Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
 •Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
 •Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
 •Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

Human beings are complicated. Even when the benefits of scientific rationality are understood and appreciated, people often want things that a central authority doesn’t expect them to want.

In 2017, Scott Alexander praised the book to his readers, explaining human resistance to high modernist progressivism: “People don’t want the right amount of Standardized Food Product, they want social interaction, culture, art, coziness, and a host of other things nobody will ever be able to calculate.” Stripe CEO Patrick Collison recently listed Seeing Like a State as #2 in the Silicon Valley canon.

James C. Scott’s characterization of “slide rule authoritarians” who clothe themselves in progressive politics perfectly describes the blinkered leadership of the public higher education sector that I’ve laid out here and here. State Universities function in the textbook high modernist manner, quantifying everything, devaluing local knowledge, and creating standardized education units legible to spreadsheets to be organized and systematized. The problem is, as Scott might have predicted, systemization doesn’t work in in controlling humans with substantial specific knowledge:

high-modernist designs for life and production tend to diminish the skills, agility, initiative, and morale of their intended beneficiaries. They bring about a mild form of this institutional neurosis. Or, to put it in the utilitarian terms that many of their partisans would recognize, these designs tend to reduce the “human capital” of the workforce. Complex, diverse, animated environments contribute…to producing a resilient, flexible, adept population that has more experience in confronting novel challenges and taking initiative. Narrow, planned environments, by contrast, foster a less skilled, less innovative, less resourceful population. (349)

To be sure, universities, like old growth forests, had longstanding and serious problems too – they were elitist, exclusive (often explicitly barring access to specific demographics), opaque, illegible, with way too much dead wood. There were good reasons to overhaul the model.

But even if the failures of today’s public universities aren’t equivalent to deadly famines, ecological dead zones, hollowed-out neighborhoods and sterile city blocks, widespread frustration has led to a sharp decline in public confidence in higher education. The five criticisms one hears: 1) high cost, 2) lack of confidence in value, 3) opacity requiring legions of advisors and counselors, 4) the progressive-left political monoculture, and 5) elitism, are all, I argue, a matter of the failure of centralization.

These criticisms – particularly opacity and questions of value, which are addressed with ever more systemizing and centralizing – are intrinsic to the “high modernist” approach to measurement and standardization. Scott’s book is particularly helpful in explaining why and how what started out as good intentions has made things worse.

In order to make this argument clear, I will turn to a failure I’ve written about in the past: why public university structures do not support a student whose parents, say, owned a plumbing business, who wanted to major in English (or some other humanities field), who would most likely end up as an apprentice in her parents’ field and perhaps taking over their business. Not only would the current system not support this student, every aspect of the system is designed to dissuade her, because her career path would show up on the system’s dashboard as an educational failure and political disaster, because a plumbing career does not seem upwardly socially mobile.

What does the State think higher ed is for?

The goal of every state centralized entity, according to Scott, is to deliver measurable value to a state, which wants “evidence” of value. What is the value of higher education? What are the “standardized education products” to be measured and evaluated? Ideally it would be learning, but you can’t measure well what every individual student “knows” upon graduation, when students study many different things. So earnings has become the yardstick. As a consequence, educational paths that deliver graduates with high salaries are deemed more successful than those who don’t.

Moreover, “social mobility” has become a measurable outcome, used by U.S. News & World Report to rank colleges and universities, even though the metric doesn’t measure “mobility” at all. Institutions are also (currently) ranked on diversity, as well as a raft of measurable outcomes.

Two new forces, the Trump Administration and AI, are exposing the weaknesses in the centralized State University: the first by dismantling DEI and the simultaneously progressive and elitist current structures, and the second by rapidly eliminating knowledge-worker positions that traditionally hired humanities graduates. As content generation, basic research, and information processing become increasingly automated, the promise of social mobility (however defined) through humanities degrees leading to office work grows less tenable. Meanwhile, physically embodied skilled trades like plumbing and pipefitting, which require spatial reasoning, manual dexterity, contextual problem-solving, and face-to-face client interaction, may well be resistant to automation and AI disruption for some time.

The New York Fed recently reported that the labor market for recent graduates was deteriorating. Derek Thompson thinks one explanation is how AI is transforming the economy. I agree.

Yet few schools are pivoting to this reality, leaving students unequipped to distinguish between AI-vulnerable and AI-proof career pathways in their future. Why? Because metrics require “simplifications” that generally exhibit five characteristics, as Scott observes, and flexibility isn’t one:

Most obviously, state simplifications are observations of only those aspects of social life that are of official interest. Second, they are also nearly always written (verbal or numerical) documentary facts. Third, they are typically static facts. Fourth, most stylized state facts are also aggregate facts…. Finally, for most purposes, state officials need to group citizens in ways that permit them to make a collective assessment. Facts that can be aggregated and presented as averages or distributions much therefore be standardized facts. (80)

That is, the centralized university is designed such that you are categorized by your degree major, that your major is stable (someone double majoring in, say, modern dance and physics is pressured to choose one, preferably physics), and that data about your major can be aggregated, with the expectation that everyone’s degree will match their eventual job title. Only then can there be clean data showing which degree majors have the best outcome.

What is higher ed actually for?

To my mind, beyond the individual benefits of a college degree, there is broader societal value in a liberal arts education that transcends career preparation. A democracy requires citizens who can interpret complex information, understand diverse perspectives, and participate in a shared cultural conversation. This is what humanities disciplines cultivate, regardless of where and how and in what company graduates practice these skills.

As I wrote last summer, the arguments for the English major to plumber pipeline:

are all about valuing the life of the mind and the values inherent in an English degree (or any liberal arts degree) for its own sake — arts appreciation, the understanding of social structures, aesthetic sensibility, history of countries and cultures, the role of language. In short, cultural capital. One might use a liberal arts education as a matter of attaining or maintaining class status, a familiarity with certain kinds of conversations and manners of polite society. The English degree ensures this social mobility (and today’s universities are all about social mobility) no matter what job one takes after college. Plumbers make better money out of the gate than most other jobs; a new graduate who takes a job as a plumber can make a great living and enjoy the fruits of a liberal arts degree on weekends, reading The New Yorker magazine, going to museums and concerts and poetry readings.

Moreover, there is a socially useful – dare I say patriotic – rationale for studying literature, as Alex Karp recently put it: “What is capable of binding us together, of offering some degree of cohesion and common narrative that might allow large groups to organize around something other than our own subsistence? It is, without any doubt, some blend of shared culture, language, history, heroes and villains, stories, and patterns of discourse.”

As I foresaw, calls for Western Civ education suggest that there may be growing national interest in looking at education as not simply transactional. Everyone seems also to be re-reading Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Historically, the working classes in the US also aspired to be educated for education’s sake.

Some years ago, I had a police officer for a neighbor who told me he had majored in English. He liked to recall a Medieval English class on Robin Hood and another on pirates. I still think that in a perfect world every police officer would major in the humanities in college. All would have a solid grounding in the human condition, in our strivings and our frailty, our zealousness and capacity for mercy, our limitations and our infinite variety. These aren’t bad skills for plumber on an emergency weekend call either.

Must education be tied to a particular job after college? It’s a serious question. In the AI era especially, the answer may be no.

Either way, currently, State higher education measurement systems can’t comprehend, let alone value, a liberal arts education that isn’t tethered a white collar career. Anything unexpected, like an English major who might want to become a police officer or a master plumber, sends the system on tilt. Here’s how it works.

The current rigid framework

Education in the U.S. is organized in part by the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) codes, maintained by the Department of Education. There is nothing inherently wrong with such an organizational principle. This list of codes been around for decades and supports colleges and universities in ensuring their majors and curricula are legible in the higher education marketplace.

Next there’s the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes, maintained by the Department of Labor. Again, nothing wrong with such a list.

However, we get into “slide rule authoritarianism” territory with the CIP-to-SOC crosswalk, designed deliberately “to match postsecondary programs of study that provide graduates with specific skills and knowledge to occupations requiring those skills or knowledge to be successful.” The “crosswalk” metaphor is simple and legible: graduates are seen as crossing the street to their workplace. The “high-performing majors” lists, according to the crosswalk, generally show computer-science at the top, nursing close behind, and a long tail of humanities degrees labeled “low alignment.” It looks objectively true.

Analysis of the crosswalk data reveals how constraining this system really is. Out of over 2,000 educational program codes, many have limited occupational pathways mapped to them. Notably, humanities programs (CIP codes 23-24) are overwhelmingly directed toward teaching positions despite graduates rarely securing such roles, with fewer than 5% of liberal arts graduates working in education after completing their credentials. Meanwhile, technical fields like plumbing (CIP 46.0503) are rigidly mapped to a narrow set of trades occupations (primarily SOC 47-2152 for Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters) with no recognition of the entrepreneurial or management paths many take. This artificial constriction in the crosswalk becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as funding mechanisms rely on these limited definitions of “success.”

The problem is that the crosswalk was designed as a suggestion (“here are jobs that might use this knowledge”), not a record of the occupational outcomes. The small print of the official user guide reminds readers that is “not based on empirical outcome data,” not meant to predict what graduates actually do for work.

But the way the grid works, any outcome that falls outside the table is marked as an error. So if an English major (CIP Code 23.01) were to start a plumbing or pipe-fitting apprenticeship (COL 47-2150), the row in the database would read “mismatch” and the outcome would drop out of the success rate. The English department loses points in the funding formula. It’s self-fulfilling prophecy: no one tracks the people who decide to move into a field that doesn’t “need” a college degree

As Seeing Like a State teaches us, once a grid exists, it becomes the reality. Funding formulas and political talking points follow the spreadsheet. Consultants hired to “trim low performing majors” cut according to spreadsheet data. This is why philosophy majors are being cut.

Recent data from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce illustrates how severe this misalignment has become. Their 2024 report Great Misalignment found that in half of all local labor markets nationwide, at least 50% of middle-skills credentials would need to be redistributed across programs of study to match projected labor demand through 2031. This systematic coding and categorization of education pathways has created a rigid system where programs that don't neatly fit predetermined classifications get pushed into a “no-value” category, affecting 26% of certificates and associate degrees and over 90% of credentials that cannot be cleanly matched in the government's crosswalk system:

At a national level, one major source of misalignment is the relatively high percentage of credentials that have little or no connection to a specific occupational cluster. Twenty-eight percent of all middle-skills credentials are granted in programs with no direct occupational match; the vast majority of these credentials are conferred in liberal arts, general studies, and humanities programs. To be clear, having no direct occupational match doesn’t mean that these credentials have no value in the marketplace or to individuals. People may pursue these credentials for reasons other than workforce preparation, such as anticipated transfer to a four-year institution, personal edification, or personal interests and values. These are all valid reasons to pursue a college education.

Is it a coincidence that the decline of confidence in higher education has accompanied the rise in tools claiming to offer evidence of success? This misalignment between measurement and reality points to a fundamental question that centralized systems often overlook: what is higher education actually for? Again, while the State views universities primarily as economic engines that should produce graduates with specific career trajectories, this narrow focus misses the broader cultural, intellectual, and civic purposes that have historically defined higher education’s role in society.

Thinking inside the grid

Now, even within State thinking, it is possible to make changes. Plumbing, HVAC, and electrical trades rank high on the federal O*NET Online database for critical thinking, problem sensitivity, and reading comprehension. If state dashboards mapped those underlying abilities instead of the degree label, any English major who became a plumber or pipefitter would stop looking like a data glitch. The fix would involve starting with the O*NET’s task lists: tag each task to cognitive and technical abilities, then let majors “light up” any job where their top three skills matter. Suddenly the pipeline is visible.

Might some English majors take the path? Looking just at the raw data, May 2024 median wage for editors is $75,260 while plumbers sit at $62,970. But this figure does not capture local knowledge or the fact that AI will take a significant number of editor jobs. Plumbers start earning wages during their apprenticeship while the path to becoming an editor often requires multiple low- or unpaid internships. A performance formula that recognizes when graduates cross a living-wage threshold (already the rule in Florida’s and California’s outcomes-based funding systems) would give a college full credit when an English major starts an apprenticeship. Also, once licensed, plumbers begin to earn in the six figures.

Some states already experiment with “measurement-for-mobility” funding: colleges earn the bonus when graduates cross a living-wage threshold or post year-three wage growth, whatever their title. Turn that pilot into standard practice and the English-major-plumber becomes possible and legible.

In fiscal 2021 more than 96,000 people completed a registered apprenticeship, a 43% jump over the decade. But none of these apprentices were visible in college scorecards because apprenticeships sit in the Labor Department’s RAPIDS database, not in higher ed surveys. Merging RAPIDS with state longitudinal data systems would let policymakers see that a English major plumber is employed, credentialed, and often making more than a communication specialist whose job is about to be replaced by AI.

Right now a quarter of licensed plumbers are already 55+ and the country is facing a plumber cliff. How many potential humanities majors could fill the gap? In 2021-22 U.S. colleges awarded 33,429 bachelor’s degrees in English and about 41,800 in “liberal-arts/general studies & humanities.” Add philosophy (11,200) and you get ~86,000 humanities BAs a year.

Meanwhile the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 43,300 plumber/pipefitter openings every year through 2033, mostly to replace retirees. Heating-and-air (HVAC) techs show another 42,500 openings a year. So the two trades most often run through the same union training centers already need ~86,000 new workers each year. Look at that!

This is a plausible scenario only if the pathway were friction-free. No one can know the exact share of English majors who’d jump, but survey data on under-employment suggests that 5–10 percent of new humanities grads look outside “degree-aligned” fields for better pay.

Can we rewild our State universities?

Scott says disaster strikes when four forces combine: a simplified map, high-modernist confidence, an all-powerful state, and a voiceless public. These forces explain why state universities cannot apprehend a humanities degree-to-trades pipeline.

Let’s talk about that voiceless public. It is true that the most significant barrier to a plumbing career from an English major lies in perception and expectation. So much of our current social and cultural infrastructure was built to view humanities degrees as preparation for “white-collar” professions (teaching, law, writing, administration) that shifting to a skilled trade like plumbing can be seen as unconventional, a step “down,” or a “waste” of a university education. There may be fear of cultural disconnect and a potential lack of understanding or support from one’s existing social circles, alongside confronting potential stereotypes about both academic fields and manual trades.

Why are the educational and career pathways for humanities degrees and skilled trades so completely separate? Why don’t universities have direct pipelines or guidance systems into trade apprenticeships? It’s a whole different system, often involving trade unions or specific vocational programs, which university career services are not equipped to support. The skillset is seen as fundamentally different, requiring a transition from primarily analytical and theoretical work to hands-on, physically demanding, and technical problem-solving. It’s not upwardly mobile. It’s not, dare I say, bourgeois.

Scott’s critique of high modernism reminds us that when systems prioritize measurement and standardization over human complexity, they inevitably create blind spots that undermine their intended goals. As Scott Alexander put it. “The state promoted the High Modernists’ platitudes about The Greater Good as cover, in order to implement the totalitarian schemes they wanted to implement anyway.”

That is, the public higher ed system today claims to promote opportunity while constraining it within narrow, predetermined pathways. By recognizing alternative routes to success we could actually address practical workforce needs while also preserving higher ed’s cultural utility. The university’s mission to produce thoughtful citizens capable of navigating complex social and political realities cannot be engineered according to high modernist principles without failing in the same ways Scott documented in agriculture and urban planning. A truly functional education system must embrace the messiness, flexibility, and unpredictability that characterize both meaningful learning and democratic life.

Let me end with this: re-reading Scott on Lenin has made me wonder about the ways public higher ed is truly collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The management structures of public universities are Neo-Leninist even as their stated output is a bourgeois product. Their operations demand unwavering enforcement of centrally dictated orthodoxies: universal access, DEI, and the doctrine of social mobility. Adherence to the party line is cultivated through a sophisticated apparatus of mandatory trainings and the marginalization of dissenting thought, creating a climate where political conformity is prized and heterodoxy is chilled. The university stops being a crucible of open debate and becomes a tightly administered organ for ideological inculcation, demanding allegiance to its transformative social missions over genuine intellectual pluralism.

And yet the public higher ed machinery is tasked with producing bourgeois citizens, equipped for professional success and upward mobility within the existing economic order. The Neo-Leninist insistence on collective ideological alignment and top-down social engineering clashes fundamentally with the cultivation of independent critical thinking, entrepreneurial spirit, and classical liberalism that are the hallmarks of bourgeois society and the traditional promise of a liberal education.

Rewilding may take a revolution.

1. I found one good piece of scholarship on James C. Scott and higher ed: Knoester, Matthew, and Paul Parkison. “Seeing Like a State: How Educational Policy Misreads what is Important in Schools." Educational Studies 53, no. 3 (2017): 247-262.)