Free Republic

“You have to have gone to college to say something that stupid." Dennis Prager would often respond to callers on his national radio show with that line when they said something so bereft of common sense that the only explanation for it had to be four or more years of brainwashing from radical professors. During his years as a graduate student in international affairs at Columbia University, where his professors believed such inane things as the belief that there is no difference between men and women and that the Soviet Union and the United States were morally equivalent during the...

Suppose you have a friend who knows little about American higher education but is eager to learn about it. You might want to recommend to him a book that introduces the subject with readily understood essays covering the range of problems we face. A good choice would be Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think. The book consists of nineteen essays by people who have been on the front lines in the battle to rescue our colleges and universities from the menaces of mediocrity and politicization. So, what has gone wrong with American higher education? One theme that...

In Chapter 10 (“Why the Worst Get on Top”) of The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek argued that centralized political authority tends to elevate the worst people in society. Goons and demagogues do not rise to the top in totalitarian systems by accident. The logic of totalitarianism selects for thuggish leaders. A less dramatic, but equally perverse, logic governs American academia. The incentive structure of the modern American university encourages relatively unsuccessful scholars, those who fail to establish fruitful research programs early in their careers, to pursue administrative positions, where they wield authority over more successful colleagues, who actually...

George Leef recently used National Review to highlight Adam Ellwanger’s Martin Center essay on students who treat education as an afterthought. They are describing a real problem. I share their frustration. But frustration is not the same as explanation. Ellwanger asks: “If you’re a serious student, it ought to be a priority. And if it isn’t a priority (or if you’re not a serious student), then why do it?” They do it because they have to. Many students are not seeking intellectual transformation. They are seeking a credential because the labor market told them they need one—told them brutally. That...

This college commencement season — from north to south, east to west, state universities to the Ivy League, law schools to military academies — one trend stood out: speeches about AI. Some speakers praised the technology and were booed; others denigrated it and were cheered. But one thing was clear, it’s all anyone can talk about. At least 25 graduating classes have heard some version of the spiel. Yes, talk about AI is timely, but it’s also not all that helpful. Nobody knows where the technology is headed, and students probably have a better grasp of that future than the...

My most recent Martin Center column highlighted the irony, considering higher education’s formative influence on America’s prevailing anti-natalist culture, of the industry’s anxiety over declining birthrates. “Where,” I asked, “are large families less welcome, or where do they seem more culturally transgressive, than on American campuses?” I quoted briefly from Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Catherine Pakaluk, who describes the book as “motivated by a single intuition: that if a phenomenon is sufficiently consequential, then its absence must also be consequential.” Current birth rates and their own responses to surveys suggest that one-in-three Gen Z...

In a new research brief, The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education found that only 44 percent of American high school students expected to earn a bachelor’s degree in 2022, down from 72 percent in 2002. The study also revealed a parental gap among high school students, with only 33 percent of first-generation students aspiring to a bachelor’s degree in 2022, compared to 60 percent two decades earlier. What are Americans, particularly those concerned about the state of higher education, to make of these findings? Are they just one of many societal indicators of an “empire in...

College is extraordinarily expensive and becoming less useful, and those who insist otherwise are working from a model of the labor market that stopped describing reality sometime in the 1990s. Four-year courses at private institutions often cost more than $70,000 a year, and it should come as no surprise that student debt has tipped over $1 trillion . This situation is ridiculous for a film student, but it is also ridiculous for a computer science graduate whose program could not keep pace with the industry it was preparing him for – and who learned more in four months on GitHub...

Robert Kelchen of the University of Tennessee, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently, described the most dire problem facing higher education today: “The list of institutions trimming academic programs, implementing furloughs, and laying off employees is long and growing…” A massive financial crunch has hit many schools because of sagging tuition revenue growth (reflecting falling enrollment or more aggressive discounting of tuition fees) and reduced public financial support in the form of federal and/or state aid and stagnant private philanthropy, all occurring in an environment of heightened inflationary pressures increasing the dollars needed to operate. While the problem...

It was once common to suggest people who lose their blue-collar jobs should “learn to code.” This is no longer very good advice, if it ever was, since coding is now something you should definitely not learn if you want to keep up with progress. (AI tells me that the number of jobs for programmers has declined by 27.5 percent since AI came along.) But “learn to code” remains a pretty good metaphor for what we faculty will have to do if we want to keep doing our jobs. Higher ed is a broken thing, and if we’re going to...

It is a running joke with my repeat students that “it depends” is the phrase most likely to set me off during a classroom discussion. Don’t get me wrong, I understand context matters, and we should strive to see as much of the picture as possible. Still, repeated appeals to “it depends” by the same student reveal a very different intent. In most cases, the student is using “it depends” as an excuse not to think carefully, substituting feelings for reason. Such students risk nothing in class discussion, insulating their beliefs and ideas from challenge in precisely the place where...

I’ve produced many maps of the 2024 election — some at state level, others at county detail — and a few that treated the results as an artificial landscape (the “Trump archipelago,” or Mars-/Moon-like views). What those maps didn’t show was how men and women, and people with and without a college degree, voted. Reddit user crazyboyhere made four maps that split the electorate by education (college / non-college) and gender (women / men).College-educated women vs. college-educated men61% of college-educated women nationwide voted for Harris, 37% for Trump….. 51% of college-educated men nationwide voted for Harris, 47% for Trump College-educated...

Diversity, equity, and inclusion have gotten a lot of attention over the past decade. In these pages, we’ve often lamented that universities’ focus on superficial measures of diversity undermines merit and overlooks viewpoint diversity. A new book by Duke professor Adrian Bejan, Diversity Through Freedom, emphasizes a different kind of diversity: the organic, inevitable, and beneficial diversity found in nature. He calls it “a phenomenon that has a mind of its own” that can’t be “shoehorned into a few distinct (antagonistic) classes.” The Martin Center sat down with Professor Bejan to discuss his book and its implications for higher education....

The general consensus among conservatives on public education is that government schools are nothing more than indoctrination centers. Even beginning in kindergarten with children as young as five, public schools are not hiding the fact that they are teaching the left-wing agenda. But as students progress through the system and go on to higher education, college professors are learning that students are sorely lacking in areas that are actually necessary. Wait getting rid of math tests led to students who can’t do math getting into college? No way. https://t.co/KnrPDYKpMq— Chris Heatherly (@chrisheatherly) May 26, 2026On Tuesday, hundreds of faculty members...

Why do public university officials do the things they do? What drives their decisions to allocate scarce resources in some ways and not others? In his recent book The University Unfettered, Ian F. McNeely offers a lot of insight into those questions. McNeely is a former (and current) faculty member and administrator, and he’s writing about his experiences at a state flagship university. He doesn’t say which one, although it’s easy to figure it out if you want to. But which state flagship doesn’t really matter, as there’s nothing unique about “The University” and those who run it. It is...

For those of us who grew up in the days before the internet, even now it's rather amazing that we have all the knowledge of the world literally at our fingertips. When I was a kid, if I wanted to know something, I looked in books; if my parents' rather extensive library didn't have the information I sought, there were a couple of city libraries within an hour or so by car, and I could generally find what I sought there. Now, though? If I'm not sitting here at my desk in front of four 27" screens and access to...

Colleges are cutting tuition for MBA programs. But it’s not out of charity or because they got another taxpayer-funded subsidy to “fix” exploding higher education prices. Rather, and perhaps counterintuitively, it’s because Uncle Sam finally capped the previously unlimited federal loans for graduate students. At first blush, this sounds like it would make the problem worse. Fewer borrowing options for students seems like it would shift more of the cost of attendance to today, when students are young with relatively low incomes. But that assumes—unrealistically—that the cost of education is fixed, and that colleges don’t respond to changes in the...

The debate over federal control of higher education has once again exposed a deeper question many conservatives have avoided asking: Why is the federal government involved in financing colleges and universities at all? The recent controversy surrounding proposed federal regulations affecting Christian colleges reveals the danger of dependency. Under a new Department of Education proposal, programs whose graduates do not meet government-defined earnings thresholds could lose access to federal loans and grants. Christian colleges are warning that ministry and theology programs could be devastated because pastors and missionaries rarely enter high-paying careers. But perhaps conservatives should ask a more fundamental...

When the United States began its experiment with federally backed student loans in the 1960s, no one predicted that, by the early 21st century, students would have run up over $1.8 trillion in debt and that many of them would be unable to repay what they owe. We were told over and over that college debt was good debt because of the huge increase in lifetime earnings that a degree was supposed to guarantee. The Tar Heel State has its own set of unique problems when it comes to student debt loads. North Carolina ranks among the top 10 states...

College radio used to have great music, from experimental jazz to progressive rock to fusion country to classical music. But then the Corporation for Public Broadcasting promised to help pay their bills... as long as they passed that money onto NPR. Your local university allowed its radio station to essentially launder money to NPR (and other even further-left organizations like Pacifica Radio). So when NPR claimed it received only 1% of its funding from the federal government, they meant only 1% came DIRECTLY from the federal government, but it nearly all came from the federal government. To the extent they...