America’s elite higher education — whose global excellence has long been unquestioned — is facing a perfect storm.
The declining number of applicants, rising tuition costs, student poverty, collapsing standards, and an increasingly politicized faculty reflect the collapse of the university system.
The country is waking up to the reality that a bachelor’s degree no longer means graduates will be well-rounded and analytical. Similarly, they are stereotyped as spoiled, largely ignorant, and with unsubstantiated opinions.
It’s no wonder that polls show a significant decline in public respect for higher education, and a growing distrust of the professoriate in particular.
Every year, the number of students enrolling in universities is significantly decreasing. Even though the U.S. population is 40 million more people than it was 20 years ago, the birth rate has fallen by about 500,000 people a year over the last 20 years.
Meanwhile, from 1980 to 2020, room, board, and tuition costs increased by 170%.
Inflation alone cannot explain the soaring costs, given that campuses have increased administrative staff while reducing faculty teaching loads. At Stanford University, there is approximately one staff member or administrator for each student on campus.
At the same time, universities began offering expensive in-home parent counseling, Club Med-style dorms and accommodations, and extracurricular activities to compete for dwindling student numbers.
With fewer applicants and higher costs, universities began offering “full-service” student aid packages, relying more heavily on government-subsidized student loans. The collective debt of over 40 million student borrowers is approaching $2 trillion.
To make matters worse, entirely new therapy majors and minors have appeared in the social sciences. Most of these gender/race/environment courses did not emphasize analytical, mathematical, or oral and written skills. Such coursework did not impress employers.
Faculty hiring has become increasingly non-meritocracy based on diversity/equity/inclusion criteria. Newly hired faculty have sought to institutionalize self-serving DEI and recalibrate higher education to prepare new generations for self-perpetuating radical ideologies.
On more elite campuses, racial quotas significantly reduced the number of Asian and white students. But its racist social engineering project called for removing the SAT requirement and comparative rankings of high school grade point averages.
When students enter college unprepared, faculty often inflate grades (80% A/A, now at Yale), relax course requirements, or add new softball classes. I added . To do otherwise while trying to maintain old standards exposed teachers to targeted charges of more than racism.
Another way to square the circle of rising tuition fees, declining student numbers, and poverty was to attract foreign students. They pay for the full cost of college, especially those who receive generous scholarships from the Middle East and China. There are now nearly 1 million foreigners, the majority of whom come from illiberal regimes and have come here on full scholarships.
While here, many see their newfound freedom as an invitation to attack America. Once here, they too often glorified the highly authoritarian government and illiberal values of their homeland, which they apparently sought to escape by coming to America.
Most international students believe that the consequences for violating campus rules and laws are generally waived. After all, they pay the full cost of their education, and partially subsidize those who don’t.
Almost half of those who enroll in college do not graduate. For those who do, on average it takes him six years to do so.
All of these realities explain why teens choose technical schools, vocational education, and community colleges. They prefer to work as skilled and sought-after merchants and in-demand labor with almost no debt.
Most people feel that even if weaponized universities destroy the old general education curriculum, there is no great loss in not earning a traditional bachelor’s degree. You can find better options for demanding, well-taught classes online at lower rates.
The result is both a disaster for higher education and a wake-up call for the nation as a whole.
Currently, an entire generation is suffering from a prolonged adolescence as they prolong their college years and spend their early to mid-twenties. The unfortunate outcome for this country is significant delays in marriage, childbearing, and home ownership, all time-honored catalysts for adulthood and the responsibilities that come with it.
A combination of politicized faculty, infantilized students, and mediocre classes undermines the prestige of college degrees, even at elite institutions. A Columbia University degree is no longer a guarantee of maturity or superior knowledge, but it does offer an incentive to employers for noisy, low-educated graduates who would rather complain to HR than increase company productivity. It’s most likely a warning.
But it may not be such a shame that much of higher education is moving in the same direction as shopping malls, movie theaters, and CDs. This country needs far more skilled manual labor, longer adolescence and less debt.
STEM courses, trade schools, and traditional campuses are better insulated from mediocrity and should persist. Otherwise, it would not be a bad thing for this country to have millions more people entering adulthood debt-free at age 18 and fewer people burdened, ignorant, and entitled at 25.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author of Basic Books’ The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. You can get in touch by emailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
