Elite higher education in America—long unquestioned as globally preeminent—is facing a perfect storm.
Fewer applicants, higher costs, impoverished students, collapsing
standards, and increasingly politicized and mediocre faculty reflect a
collapse of the university system.
The country is waking up to the reality that a bachelor’s degree no
longer equates with graduates being broadly educated and analytical.
Just as often, they are stereotyped as pampered, largely ignorant, and
gratuitously opinionated.
No wonder polls show a drastic loss of public respect for higher
education and, specifically, a growing lack of confidence in the
professoriate.
Each year, there are far fewer students entering college. Despite a
U.S. population 40 million larger than 20 years ago, fertility rates
have fallen in two decades by some 500,000 births per year.
Meanwhile, from 1980 to 2020, room, board, and tuition increased by 170%.
Skyrocketing costs cannot be explained by inflation
alone, given that campuses have lightened faculty teaching loads while
expanding administrative staff. At Stanford, there is nearly one staffer
or administrative position for every student on campus.
At the same time, to vie for a shrinking number of students,
colleges began offering costly in loco parentis counseling, Club
Med-style dorms and accommodations, and extracurricular activities.
As applicants grew scarcer and expenses went up, universities began
offering “full service” student-aid packages, heavily reliant on
government-subsidized student loans. The collective indebtedness of more than 40 million student borrowers is nearing $2 trillion.
Worse still, an entire new array of therapeutic majors and minors
appeared in the social sciences. Most of these gender/race/environmental
courses did not emphasize analytical, mathematical, or oral and written
skills. Such coursework did not impress employers.
Faculty hiring had become increasingly non-meritocratic based on
diversity-equity-inclusion criteria. New faculty hires have sought to
institutionalize self-serving DEI and recalibrate higher education to
prepare a new generation for self-perpetuating radical ideologies.
At the more elite campuses, racial quotas vastly curtailed the number
of Asian and white students. But that racialist social engineering
project required dropping the SAT requirement and comparative ranking of
high school grade-point averages.
As less well-prepared students entered college, faculty either
inflated grades (80% are A/A- now at Yale), watered down their course
requirements, or added new softball classes. To do otherwise while
attempting to retain old standards earned targeted faculty charges of
racism and worse.
Another way to square the circle of rising costs and fewer and poorer
students was to attract foreign students. They pay the full costs of
college, especially those on generous stipends from the Middle East and China. Nearly a million foreign nationals, the majority from illiberal regimes, are now here on full scholarships.
While here, many see their newfound freedoms as invitations to attack
America. Once here, they too often romanticize the very autocratic
governments and illiberal values of their homelands that they seemingly
sought to escape by coming to America.
Most foreign students assume they are exempt from the consequences of
violating campus rules or laws in general. After all, they pay the full
cost of their education and thus partially subsidize those who do not.
Almost half of all those enrolled in college never graduate. Those who do, on average, require six years to do so.
All these realities explain why teenagers increasingly opt for trade
schools, vocational education, and community colleges. They prefer to
enter the workforce largely debt-free and in demand as skilled,
sought-after tradespeople.
Most feel that if the old general education curriculum has been
destroyed at weaponized universities, then there is no great loss in
skipping the traditional bachelor’s degree. A far better selection of
demanding and well-taught classes can be found online at a lower cost.
The result is a disaster for both higher education and a wake-up call for the country at large.
Entire generations are now suffering from prolonged adolescence as
they drag out college to consume their early and mid-20s. The
unfortunate result for the country is a radical delay in marriage,
childbearing, and homeownership—all the time-honored catalysts for
adulthood and the responsibilities that come with it.
Politicized faculty, infantilized students, and mediocre classes have
combined to erode the prestige of college degrees, even at once elite
colleges. A degree from Columbia no longer guarantees either maturity or
preeminent knowledge, but is just as likely a warning to employers of a
noisy, poorly educated graduate more eager to complain to Human
Resources than to enhance a company’s productivity.
Yet it may not be all that unfortunate that much of higher education
is going the way of malls, movie theaters, and CDs. The country needs
far more skilled physical labor and less prolonged adolescence and debt.
STEM courses, professional schools, and traditional campuses are
better insulated from mediocrity and should survive. Otherwise, millions
more starting adulthood at 18 debt-free and fewer encumbered, ignorant,
and entitled at 25 is not a bad thing for the country.
