Posted on 10/05/2026 9:08:23 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
American higher education is in retreat. It’s shrinking. The for-sale signs have gone up. It’s time for “inventory reduction.” Forty-nine colleges have closed since 2020. Forty others have merged with neighbors. The Huron Consulting Group says that 400 colleges are at risk of closing in the next decade. The prospect of insolvency has now moved beyond small colleges. Larger ones are closing programs and laying off faculty.
Not counting community colleges, trade schools, online-only outfits and clandestine thinkatoriums, some 2,700 four-year institutions are currently authorized to hand out college degrees in the US. That compares with 4,150 licensed hot dog stands in New York City alone and 267,000 licensed massage parlors across the country. The market for hot dogs and massages is holding steady.
The market for college degrees? Not so much. It is the old story of more supply than demand: too few students for too many seats. People who build things imagine customers will keep coming forever, until they don’t. In the 1930s, 16 major railroads folded and in the 1970s, 23 more ground to a halt. All was not lost. Americans ended up with some excellent bike paths.
At the top of the list of higher education’s woes is a demographic cliff. During the 2008 recession, young couples became baby-averse. The birthrate plunged and stayed low. Those children who were never conceived would now be freshmen, and the system built to educate them finds itself like a large bus carrying a handful of passengers.
The cost of running the bus doesn’t decline in sync with the loss of riders. Fixed expenses don’t like falling revenues. Moreover, the dearth of children will continue for at least 15 more years. Colleges can’t wait it out.
Higher education knew this was coming and tried to offset it by recruiting more students from abroad and cajoling more Americans unsuited to college to enroll anyway. The ditching of SATs at 90 percent of the institutions marked the advent of the enrollment-at-any-cost era. The gains were marginal and the cost to academic reputation was large.
There are other reasons why college enrollment is in crisis. For one thing, Americans of all political persuasions no longer trust colleges and universities as institutions. The latest Gallup Poll shows that 77 percent of Republicans and 50 percent of Democrats distrust American higher education – a figure that continues to grow.
The distrust comes from the cratering value of the education they provide. Most colleges have become sandboxes for indolent students. The teachers pretend to teach, the students pretend to learn and everybody gets an A. It isn’t all the teachers’ fault. They have to deal with students who have been haphazardly recruited and often subjected to 12 years of “Social Emotional Leaning.” The majority are “book virgins” who have reached college without ever reading an entire work cover to cover. They aren’t going to start with The Republic.
But as teaching standards have fallen, tuition and expenses have surged. Americans now carry a total of $1.863 trillion in student-loan debt. That’s the second largest sum of consumer debt, behind home mortgages. A house, however, has intrinsic value. A college degree is worth only what the graduate can make of it. Student-loan debt impedes graduates who want to get married or change jobs. It cannot be defaulted on. It can linger even into one’s retirement years.
Then there’s the matter of waste and bloat. More than half the salaried employees of colleges and universities are now in “student services” rather than education. What students get for their tuition dollar is a full range of counseling, stroking, reassurance and diversion from the actual acquisition of knowledge and skills.
If the students can’t be relied on to read more than a page or two per week, what can a professor do? He, or more likely she, can profess. Teaching students about racism, sexism, colonialism and the myriad forms of injustice embedded in “late-stage capitalism” is one approach. The list of the top 20 most-assigned college texts incudes The Communist Manifesto and Edward Said’s Orientalism, but the real story is not what books are assigned, but what the professors communicate in class.
Wokeness isn’t in the syllabus; it’s in the air. Gender dynamics also play a role. More than 60 percent of undergraduate students are women. Men increasingly turn away from college as something that doesn’t meet their educational and career goals. They are also turned off by the high degree of bias against men in both the curriculum and campus culture.
Besides, only 17.8 percent of posted jobs even require a bachelor’s degree or higher. More than half list no educational requirements at all. Indeed, with all the debt and opportunity cost now involved, a college degree can be an impediment to the start of a promising career, not counting hot dog provider or masseuse.
AI threatens the entire edifice. Artificial intelligence has made it child’s play to avoid reading assigned texts or writing essays on assigned topics. Many faculty members have capitulated, seeing no way to resist the tide. Some have enthusiastically embraced it as a new way of learning. AI has also dented the proposition that a college degree is an all-purpose, adaptable credential for employment. Some employers still think a college degree testifies to useful knowledge and skills, but they will soon learn better.
This is no reason to despair. These institutions have been making themselves obsolete for a long time. Better not to get in their way.
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Should Mich. still be funding U. o’ Mich.?
Was/is your Advisor being funded by offshore sources?
USAID?
My guess is that higher education will eventually have some form of comprehensive knowledge and skills exam as a graduation requirement or at least as part of the academic record. To do so though will require dealing with the disparate effects on racial and ethnic groups. For now, most universities would rather publicly execute half their faculty at random than have such painful truths revealed and publicly documented.
Even my “college” (seminary) closed last year after 100+ years. Compared to the fundamentals and policies it had had for decades, it slowly let things seep in to put them on the path of whatever the religious equivalent is to “wokeness”.
The end could be predicted when contemporary Christian music began to push aside traditional hymnary. CCM is the gateway drug to caving to the world, when Christians are supposed to be separated from it.
The million dollar football and basketball industry is not helping...I see many colleges dropping sports all together...
Looking back, I suspect that Prof. L. was in part relied on to help assess information and people in the spy game. Having fought both the Nazis and the Soviets in Czechoslovakia, he knew how that worked when your life and your country were at stake.
Thanks for the reply.
So, he was at least partly/marginally funded [by apparently the better part] through the See-Eye-Eh [a little Canadian lingo there...].
The Labs for STEM courses were very valuable.
Much of the test equipment in the Labs where I hung out had DOD “brass tags”.
The Trump administration is trying to stop federal school loans for the dumb meaningless courses.
#13 imagine what Edison could have done if only he had a college education....
400 colleges are at risk of closing in the next decade.
Wow, the institutes of lower learning have finally hit the wall.
That’s good news.
“I see many colleges dropping sports all together...”
I see collegiate sports as the only reason for many colleges to continue on.
Its their only valued added reason to exist.
Unfortunately many kids and their parents do not consider the return on investment or ROI. Spending $80,000 on a degree in West African Negro Lesbian Studies is poor planning. If such a graduate can even find a paying job using the degree, it probably pays less than a coffee barista.
Unfortunately I had a family member graduate with a degree in psychology, couldn’t get well-paying jobs anywhere, and finally went back to school to get her RN. Did quite well after that but was always quite annoyed that businesses did not want to pay big bucks for a job that, to the business, was an expense, not a profit maker.
Perhaps it is time to give up the Once-Saved-Always-Saved ideas and join an Apostolic church? there might be a good Orthodox church near where you live
How many employees did he have that actually did the work and creation?
I spoke with a futurist from MIT years ago
He predicted we would move from degrees to testing and certifications
And that has been happening
Now that offsite proctored computer testing is occurring it will happen faster.
You can access videos of every class MIT teaches.. and have been able to. For the past 15 years.
For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States. The State Department is exposing the full history of Cuban espionage and subversion in our country. (PDF download)
July 2026 | Secretary Marco Rubio @SecRubio
Cuba-Report, Universities
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Cuba-Report.pdf
True Believers
Cuba’s intelligence strategy differs from the standard Russian, Chinese, or Iranian model in at least one major respect: rather than paid mercenaries, Cuba recruits diehard ideologues.Whereas other intelligence services often buy their assets or – particularly in the case of China – exploit the national loyalties of their ethnic diaspora, Cuba’s most consequential and damaging American spies were what one might describe as “true believers.” Most were never paid significant sums of money, beyond occasional reimbursement for operational expenses. Under the perpetual resource constraints of a small, embargoed economy, Cuban intelligence perfected an alternative recruitment model around exploiting ideological loyalty. In many cases, that model has outperformed anything money could buy. Not only does it mean that Cuba’s American spies tend to be fiercely loyal to Havana; it also often renders them uniquely inconspicuous. In contrast to paid agents, they have no obvious “paper trail” – unexplained deposits, sudden luxury purchases, or paid-off debts.
This is one reason why U.S. universities are one of the premier targets of Cuba’s subversive activities, serving as fertile ground for recruiting ideologically sympathetic young Americans who will ascend to positions of influence, power, and access. U.S. intelligence analysis and DI defector testimony have both established that Cuban intelligence treats infiltrating American universities as a top priority – as one former Cuban agent recounted, the regime’s intelligence operation seeks to identify politically-engaged leftist students at elite U.S. universities who will go on to “occupy positions of importance in the private sector and in the government.” DI does this through both overt partnerships and covert intelligence operations, exploiting ideological affinity among left-wing students and faculty to both expand its “fellow travelers” nexus and recruit active agents. DI’s founder himself, Manuel Piñeiro – also known as Commander Barbarroja (“Red Beard”) – attended Columbia University in the 1950s.
Cuban organizations and academic institutions maintain scholarships, exchange programs and other partnerships with a striking number of elite universities in the United States. As of 2023, the University of Havana – a key node in the Cuban intelligence network – purportedly held educational exchange agreements with nearly 80 U.S. universities.10 As recently as 2017, representatives from Harvard University traveled to Havana themselves to sign an agreement with Cuba’s Ministry of Higher Education expanding “opportunities for potential collaborative research and cooperation between Harvard and Cuban universities, such as short courses, internships, research visits, publication of research articles, and academic workshops and conferences.”
Today’s good news story!
Colleges are literally running themselves out of business. Most of their degrees are meaningless in the job market and they’ve hurt themselves badly by turning into bran washing centers for the DNC.
For decades I've been promoting career planning over college planning. First pick a career. Then ask someone already in that career what it's like and what kind of training is of worth. Bonus points if you can talk to a manager who makes hiring and promotion decisions. They know the real value of different colleges and vocational schools and different degrees and majors, etc. In 11th grade I asked software programmers for advice and they told me to get a BS in computer science and which schools were good at teaching it.
As hiring decisions change, particularly as colleges become more and more woke indoctrination mills and less on actual skills, I bet my algorithm still holds true. It's still best to ask the people who make the hiring decisions what they're looking for in candidates --- before you spend time and money developing skills that you hope meets your end goals.
Going forward, I see testing agencies becoming valuable. Wanting to hire an engineer or software designer or architect and have no clue how to evaluate if their training is worth anything? Testing/certification agencies (think job head hunters) will do evaluation work for you. Whether the job applicant trained himself at home or has a formal college training or vocational school training, all you care about is if he can demonstrate that he knows his stuff.
Prof. L. had a thick accent and a droll sense of humor. He described one day in class how he was under KGB surveillance after he fled Czechoslovakia to Vienna. He was apparently seen as a threat because he was a genuine anti-fascist who had fought the Nazis, been in the post-war Czech government, and opposed the Soviet takeover and communism in general.
The KGB thus saw him as a potential opposition figure and suspected him of working for the CIA. As the professor put it, "Actually, I was not working for the CIA ... at that time." Worries over the safety of his wife and young children led him to begin an American academic career.
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