The Deal Changed

 A friend of mine confided to me that although he was college educated, and had a graduate degree and a professional career, that his actual lifestyle was not as good as his father’s- a career military guy that had not gone to college.   My friend lived in a smaller house, worked longer hours, took fewer vacations, did not have a second home, and was much less secure.

How did this happen?

I posited that one reason was that the State (writ large) and academia had conspired to extract his excess productivity and wealth creation.  Between taxes and college tuition that far exceeded the inflation rate, any of his gains were being soaked up by government and higher education.

He is not alone.

Just as the deal has changed with respect to living in an urban area, the deal with higher ed has changed.

Faced with inflation, companies would often reduce the size of the contents and the serving size—as if you wouldn’t notice a chocolate bar that is 1/3 smaller.  Higher ed has done the same thing.

Not only has it increased the price (since 1985, tuition increases have been roughly twice the inflation rate), but the product has been watered down, especially with the advent of Wokeness over the past decade.  Critical thinking is out. Woke is in.  History is out.  Grievance studies is in.  Tuition is so egregiously expensive that “working your way through college” has become an anachronism.

Look, we all bought into it.  I did.  I sent both of my kids to college.

The deal has changed.

First, the cost is prohibitive.  If you have to graduate with huge debts, and have to count on “debt cancellation,” it’s probably not worth it.  First of all, there is no such thing as “debt cancellation.” Debt that will not be paid back ends up running through someone’s income statement.  And that should not be the federal government.  Second, by permitting students to borrow money that cannot be paid back, academia is avoiding cost containment that every other industry has had to confront.  Third, academia has watered down its offerings.  A “gender studies” major at a liberal arts institution has hardly prepared a young person to earn a decent wage in a competitive economy.

With colleges at the forefront of “safe spaces,”  “trigger warnings,”  “preferred pronouns,” speech codes and such lunacy that inhibits critical thinking, the entire model is now questionable.  Instead of educating kids,  higher ed is enfantilizing them.  Almost all social science, literature and history departments are heavily liberal.   A conservative historian has almost zero chance of a faculty job anywhere in the US.  Postmodernism has a tight grip in academia, so the chances of getting exposure to a wide range of views is almost nil.  The lowering of standards to get the right gender and racial makeup has degraded these places as the price has gone up.

Finally, the COVID restrictions, vaccine mandates remote learning have really changed the deal.  Putting aside the morality of forced vaccines (with unknown long term consequences) on a healthy population and either masked or remote learning is hardly worth the tuition price.

I read with great pleasure Jonathan Cole’s 2009 book The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensible National Role, Why It Must Be Protected.   Cole’s 2009 book asserts that the US higher education is a marvel of the world.   A mere 13 years later, I wonder if Cole holds the same view.   My old professor, Daniel Pipes clearly does not.  He sees a painful and abrupt reckoning on the horizon for higher education in his March, 2021 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

https://www.danielpipes.org/20318/the-future-of-us-higher-education

Even at my alma mater, which had codified its principles of free speech, Wokeism has chipped away at its edifice.  Free speech, free thought is the essence of a liberal education.  And it is being systematically suffocated at most universities.

Finally, there is China.   The pernicious influence of the CCP throughout higher education cannot be understated.  From the recent conviction of Charles Liebman, head of the chemistry department at Harvard to the China BiWeekly Seminar on Public Economics at The University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute, the CCP has infiltrated throughout higher education.  We have between 300-400 thousand Chinese students here every year.  Why are we educating Chinese youth, while neglecting our own?  These students will become the foundation for the regime that seeks to upend the U.S.  One only needs to look at the NBA to see what happens to free speech and free thought when an industry becomes dependent on Chinese money. 

The deal has been changed.  As with urban living, we need to rethink our deal with higher education.  The quality has gone down.  The price has gone up.  It has been repurposed for aims that are anti-Enlightenment.   And it has allowed the CCP to take residence.   In the parlance of the Woke, higher ed needs to be deconstructed.