Posted on 12/22/2022 4:26:21 AM PST by MtnClimber
Elite university degrees certify very little. And the secret is out.
In a famous exchange in the The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway wrote: “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
“Gradually” and “suddenly” applies to higher education’s implosion.
During the 1990s “culture wars” universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above the rate of inflation were unsustainable.
Their growing manipulation of blanket federal student loan guarantees, and part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants always was suicidal.
Left-wing indoctrination, administrative bloat, obsessions with racial preferences, arcane, jargon-filled research, and campus-wide intolerance of diverse thought short-changed students, further alienated the public—and often enraged alumni.
Over the last 30 years, enrollments in the humanities and history crashed. So did tenure-track faculty positions. Some $1.7 trillion in federally backed student loans have only greenlighted inflated tuition—and masked the contagion of political indoctrination and watered-down courses.
But “gradually” imploding has now become “suddenly.” Zoom courses, a declining pool of students, and soaring costs all prompt the public to question the college experience altogether.
Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year—or over 4 percent alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14 percent in the last decade. Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million people a year.
Men account for about 71 percent of the current shortfall of students. Women number almost 60 percent of all college students—an all-time high.
Monotonous professors hector students about “toxic masculinity,” as “gender” studies proliferate. If the plan was to drive males off campus, universities have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
The number of history majors has collapsed by 50 percent in just the last 20 years. Tenured history positions have declined by one-third to half at major state universities.
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
I didn’t go to college, although I spend a good deal of time at several of them. Central PA is home to Bucknell, Susquehanna, and Bloomsburg U.
My fellow millennials, and the zoomers who follow us, are by and large a shockingly illiterate mess of undifferentiated brain matter. Whether or not they’ve acquired a degree.
Many were educated at Snapple U. They “know” the factoids learned from bottle caps.
They can’t tell time (never mind BE on time), make change (nor save any), or spell (and their command of grammar is primary grade level). History? “Not a thing” anymore. Those man-in-the-street videos are no fiction. You can replicate them at Bucknell, though it’s considered one of America’s high-ranking liberal arts colleges.
Advice to teens: learn plumbing, farming, hunting, radio, first aid, carpentry. You’re gonna need it!
Academic standards have been eroded for over a century by Fabian socialists, accompanied by the devaluation of degrees other than as a credential.
The only way universities can continue to exist is by harvesting dumb 18 year-olds for their student loan dollars and burying them in debt for the rest of their lives.
That business model is no longer sustainable.
Hopefully.
And that wasn't an unintended consequence.
One hopes so.
Add Duke to your list.
His education, at a notable New England engineering university, prepared him to do this.
He has a six figure job waiting for him when he graduates next year. Many of his classmates already have good and well paying jobs lined up as well.
Not all are worthless wokesters majoring in Lesbian Lute Lullabies in Lower Lichtenstein.
Males are insane to enroll in ultra-expensive modern universities, where they are treated as pariahs.
Author Mike Rowe has given them a far more enlightened option.
One of my kids attended a small, private, specialized engineering university. They only offered three majors and had no dorms, cafeteria or sports program. They concentrate on academics.
They don’t force diversity. It happens naturally.
It’s located in Maryland right between a NASA facility and the NSA so nearly everyone ends up working there.
I see that as a good future for academics instead of the monster university that cares more about children’s games than academics.
My Master’s adviser at Arizona State, Robert Loewenberg, called the universities “sick cows” in the 70s. I thought they were doomed since the 90s.
We can all hope and pray, YES!
I might consider hiring a STEM grad, but the rest? Unless they could pass a good 1930s era high school graduation test, feggedabowdit.
“sick cows” with mad cow disease!
Ping! Out to the Victor Davis Hanson list
At Yale, the class of 2026 is listed as 50 percent white and 55 percent female. Fourteen percent were admitted as “legacies.” In sum, qualified but poor white males without privilege or connections seem mostly excluded.
Stanford’s published 2025 class profile claims a student body of “23 percent white.” Fewer than half of the class is male. Stanford mysteriously does not release the numbers of those successfully admitted without SAT tests—but recently conceded it rejects about 70 percent of those with perfect SAT scores.
In fact, universities are quietly junking test score requirements. Ironically, these time-honored standardized tests were originally designed to offer those from underprivileged backgrounds, or less competitive high schools, a meritocratic pathway into elite schools.
FR Index of his articles: Victor Davis Hanson on FR
Town Hall: Victor Davis Hanson on Town Hall
American Greatness: Victor Davis Hanson on American Greatness
His website: Victor Davis Hanson
Please let me know if you want on or off this new VDH ping list.
As a reminder, Professor Hanson has asked that we do not post the full article of his writings. Thank you for following the link to finish his article.
Same experience here except I stayed with it and finished my BS in CS. As someone who had been reading books and magazines on my own to program a Commodore 64 since I was 14 (I'm showing my age here LOL), when I got to college my first few courses seemed elementary. I even did well in math in high school so I could score high on the placement test (which I did) to satisfy the math prerequisites for the first few CS courses so I could take them in my first quarter (which I did).
But I stayed with it because I had talked to programmers in my area when I was in 11th grade and asked them what kind of training was good both on the resume and in giving me actual skills I wouldn't think to research and learn on my own. They all told me what kind of training was really good (almost all of them said a BS in CS in any of the University of Alabama schools, even an Auburn alum told me that) and if I stayed with it I'd learn a lot in my junior and senior courses (which I did).
So if anyone can do self-motivated learning and combine it with really good training (after vetting from the folks who know what the good training is), it's the best of both worlds.
My college now has one less conservative faculty member. Me.
Did you teach?
Egad. What on earth does that mean? That there are huge numbers of people getting "perfect SAT scores"???
How does that happen? Are SATS being dumbed down, are schools getting better at teaching kids to pass SATS, or is there cheating going on?
From a website called "CollegeWise": "...The top 1% of all test-takers comprises those scoring in the range of 1550-1600 on the SAT scoring scale. That top 1% of 2.2 million test-takers comprised nearly 22,000 test-takers from the Class of 2020. This suggests that there are some few thousand (at a maximum) who received a perfect score..."
I read on Quora that 96% of all applicants to Stanford are rejected, regardless of SAT score. Out of those 4% of the applicants who apply-how many applicants were accepted with lower SAT scores, and were they being accepted based on race, gender, or some some kind of social construct such as membership in clubs or legacy applications? That would seem to be what VDH says.
Er, out of that 4% who are ACCEPTED, not who apply, my mistake.
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