Posted on 05/02/2024 3:45:33 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Politicized faculty, infantilized students, and mediocre classes have combined to erode the prestige of college degrees, even at once elite colleges.
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 percent.
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 over 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 course work did not impress employers.
Faculty hiring had become increasingly non-meritocratic
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
“Fewer applicants, higher costs, impoverished students, collapsing standards, and increasingly politicized and mediocre faculty reflect a collapse of the university system.”
DEI at work!
Iran wants them all. We should send them and then pull their citizenship after they enroll in the Iranian univerities;)
Cancel their citizenship, but never cancel their debt so we can keep them on the no-fly list and make them outlaws when they visit their in-laws;)
When the truly stupid can get grants and loans to pay 60 to 100,000 thousand a year for 'higher education' that consists of remedial reading and 'grievance studies' this is what happens. It's too much for corrupt morally bankrupt greedy Universities to pass up and within the process everyone is corrupted.
What if your goal is to be a Climate Scientist?
My niece is graduating from high school in a few weeks and has decided to attend technical school to learn welding. I applaud her decision.
Sad.
Can they be saved?
NOT A CHANCE IN HELL!
The headline asks “Can the Current Universities be Saved?”
The correct response is, “Why?”
There is nothing productive or redeeming about them anymore.
These brainwashing “camps” are no longer a gateway to success or happiness in life for America’s youth.
Universities are now about as useful as car theft rings or mobs of looters.
Today’s American universities are a monumental waste of billions of dollars and a direct threat to the survival of the USA.
Destroy the communist universities - Save America !
“Victor Davis Hanson: Can The Current Universities Be Saved?”
hopefully not ...
Well at least we know they aren't learning anything useful. They will go back to their home country's dumber than when they left with the only useful skill they learned is to agitate for stupid polices.
WHY BOTHER???
Why bother? They’ll just foment more hatred.
The traditional way of thinking is that college-age students seek the educational services that colleges and universities provide based on the balance of the student's educational needs and ability to finance the experience. Correspondingly, the colleges offer areas of studies that match the student's needs at a competitive cost.
The reality is that students are just a pass-through for colleges. In addition to the typical SALLIE MAE student loans and PELL grants, there is an ocean of funding from public and private sources. Every industry offers scholarships to the children or close relatives of its members. Church groups, civic organizations, professional societies all offer funding for the progeny of their supporters.
The new business model identifies applicants that have the most access to this ocean of funding. Academic achievement or aptitude in the desired field of study is a distant second. Under the new business model. a students first visit is not to their academic advisor but to the financial aid office where trained bureaucrats identify all the potential sources of financing available and assist the student in filling out the forms needed to generate the checks that follow. The student never sees the cash rewards from the grants and scholarships. These go directly to the college in the form of tuition, room, board and fees.
Under this model, the student's value is tied directly to their ability to generate dollars for the college. Inasmuch as the college has time and money invested in attracting and signing the student to their “contract” with the institution, the goal now becomes keeping the student tied to the milking machine for as long as possible. Retention is king! Academic achievement and recognition is given in the same spirit that Don Rickles offered a cookie for good behavior. It is a sarcastic afterthought.
I think colleges and universities can be saved if the financing paradigm is flipped. If the colleges were required to be cosignatories to any loans, I think you would see lots of marginal colleges start offering courses with intrinsic value in no time at all. As a previous post correctly pointed out, some things need rigorous study: medicine, law, engineering and architecture to name a few. For the rest, a few hours spent in a good library will suffice. When colleges and universities are forced to confront this reality, change will follow.
All college sports programs should be disbanded. Intramurel only. No pre-professional teams. This would go a very long way to totally defunding the universities.
Aghhh! HERESY! KILL THE HERETIC! < /sarc >
LOL.
There is a good deal of irony here that the people clamoring for large-scale societal change are about to experience it, good and hard.
The answer to the headline question is “No, and they shouldn’t be.” But I doubt the Totalitarian Party will allow them to fail. They’re too valuable to its authoritarian goals. They’ll be propped up, at taxpayer expense of course.
“lawyer”? Why would you need college to be a lawyer, lawbooks are not difficult to read, right versus wrong is not a difficult concept, legal versus illegal is pretty simple.
Now if your talking about being able to twist the meaning of normal words and sentences perhaps that’s when the necessity for a DEI education might come in handy.
It’s already been proven that a hodgepodge of meaningless psychobabble DEI wordsmithing can get you a published and peer reviewed paper, modern lawyering is no different!
Your niece is going to OUT EARN and OUT PERFORM all of her DEI competition.
She will be making a 100 grand a year when her competition is asking “would you like fries with that”.
If she goes into a specialty field of welding she will be making even more!
CONGRATS ON HAVING A BRILLIANT NIECE!!!!
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