The only reason so many polled still think that colleges are essential to education is that their own education was inadequate and their critical thinking faculties are under-developed. Or they are Democrats. Or both.
Substacker Steven Hayward writes,
Nearly every day brings fresh news of another university facing a huge budget deficit and enacting significant cuts to programs and personnel. The latest is the University of Minnesota, which is imposing cuts to fill a $225 million shortfall over the next two years chiefly because of the declining enrollment that everyone knew was coming. The University of Maine is likewise imposing—gasp!—faculty layoffs to close a $19 million budget shortfall.
Yet universities were heedless of the coming financial collapse, and went on building climbing walls, plush dorms, and adding more and more layers of useless and/or mendacious administrators (you gotta put those gender studies majors to work somewhere). (I reported here previously about the travails of Syracuse University, which is cutting whole departments because of falling enrollment and plunging revenue.)
Meanwhile, here is what an Ivy League education produces:
They haven’t even been taught the meaning of “justice.”
This isn’t just the fault of the university. In the early 2000’s, I worked for a failing university. Student enrollment was dropping and we couldn’t seem to attract students. We were one of the cheapest schools in the state and we were one of the most highly ranked for quality of graduates. We were tier 1 with the Navy for their nuclear engineering program and had one of the highest med school acceptance rates in the region. We hired a consultant who surveyed prospective students about why they didn’t choose us. The main reasons are below.
(1) We had dorms, they wanted apartments.
(2) We had an old-style gym, they wanted a modern ‘wellness center’.
(3) We didn’t have enough entertainment.
Well, all those things are expensive. We hadn’t increased tuition at all for 3 years. But, we paid good money for the survey, so we built some ‘suite-style’ dorms and more students came. We increased tuition to pay for it. We built a new ‘wellness center’, more students came. We increased tuition. We added more sports and entertainment, more students came, and we increased tuition. We increased tuition by 75% or so, did nothing to academics, and doubled enrollment in just over 5 years. If the school hadn’t done that, it would have gone under. Students demanded those luxuries and were more than willing to pay for them with student loans.
Accreditation bodies have mandated the DEI and diversity positions. Colleges would lose their accreditation without them. The accreditation bodies will put your school on monitoring or worse if you don’t have a bunch of organized minority groups and enough DEI administrators. They even demand that schools maintain records about what the minority student groups do and have standards for what they have to do each year. About the only thing the accreditation bodies don’t monitor or enforce is academic standards. If you try to fight it, your school will lose accreditation and go bankrupt.
Imagine if every attorney was evaluated by the ABA every 10 years and got to keep their law license if and only if the ABA approved of that attorney. Imagine if the ABA was allowed to apply any standards they wanted (legal or not). That is higher ed accreditation. After living through 5 accreditation visits, there was not 1 math, hard science, or engineering professor on the accreditation team. The team never asked to see syllabi, final exams, or test scores.