Are Universities Doomed?

American Greatness ^ | 21 Dec, 2022 | Victor Davis Hanson

[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.

[drwoof]

Your observations are spot on. Twice now in the past month I’ve been asked for my birthdate by a 20-something who needed to input that information into some kind of form. They could not convert the spoken name of the month into a number: “So, what number is that?” “Excuse me?” “What number is that month. I have to put in a number.” We are so completely screwed.

[EnderWiggin1970]

Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million people a year.

I know this is off-topic, but if current illegal immigration is around 3 million a year (per a report the other day in Washington Examiner), and legal immigrants are averaging very roughly around 1 million a year (https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/annual-number-of-us-legal-permanent-residents), doesn't this mean the US native population is dying off already at a rate of 2 million/year?

It wasn't long ago that the rule-of-thumb was an increase of 3 million/year for the US, either.

[Huskrrrr]

Yes, I taught organic and biochemistry for 14 years.

[MtnClimber]

OK, so a REAL university course. Did you just retire or did the wokeism become unbearable?

[William Tell]

”I read on Quora that 96% of all applicants to Stanford are rejected, regardless of SAT score.”

The year I applied to the Stanford graduate school they had 7000 applicants for 1000 admissions. The Dean of Admissions had to say no to 6 students for every one that he said yes to. What a job that must have been.

[EQAndyBuzz]

“Outstanding! My path was a little different. I started college in 1983, but after a year and a half decided I was wasting my father’s money. I joined the Air Force in 1985, and literally saw the world.”

I did the same thing, but joined the Air Force in 79. Only difference was I saw a missile silo in South Dakota for 4 years.

[rlmorel]

Yes.

People seem willing to denigrate a college education, but there are certain professions that just cannot be accommodated by trade schools or OJT.

Just cannot be done.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t people out there who could do nearly anything, because some people are just brilliant. But that isn’t something you can bank on.

I will say, though, that may be one of the reasons things are in such a dire way, because the quality of an education is being diluted not because people are stupider, which I don’t think is any truer today than it might have been 100 years ago, but because the people designing the educational process today value education far less than virtue signalling.

[GaltAdonis]

"...to program a Commodore 64 since I was 14..."

.

Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 3 and then a VIC-20 here - same age as you.
Then later when I was a Junior in high school I bought one of the
first original IBM PCs - $3000+ - It had TWO 5 1/4 inch floppy drives!
I had to swap diskettes a dozen times to compile a small Fortran program. LOL!

PS: I'm 58.

My latest computer purchase was a kamrui-ak1-pro-mini-pc - 5 x 5 x 2 inches.
Clock speed is 2.9 gigahertz - whereas the IBM PC was 4.77 kilohertz. LOL!

[William Tell]

"... not because people are stupider ..."

I think you mean that it is not because people are less intelligent. They are definitely stupider.

The American Revolution was a giant step away from the tyranny of monarchy, in great part due to the size of the Atlantic Ocean. The fact that the Revolution did not solve all social injustices is hardly justification for today's under-informed youth to reject it.

It took about ninety years for the majority of Americans to support taking up arms to kill Southerners, resulting in the end of slavery.

It's been thirty years since Kalifornia made it a felony for me to put a plastic pistol grip on my rifle. It's still illegal.

[rlmorel]

You are correct, I was imprecise.

[Ronaldus Magnus III]

DemocRATS love to divide, divide, divide. They just love finding more and more ways to divide us up, and then pit one group against another. They are, after all, the party of segregation and the KKK.

Stanford University, while touting and celebrating ‘diversity’ has developed segregated housing: The Ujamaa House is for African-American; The Okada House is for Asians; The Casa Zapata is for Chicanx and Latinx (99% of Spanish speakers do not like the new Latinx phraseology, and they do not speak Latin either).

The Stanford University website explains: “”Our ethnic theme communities have a rich and long history of engaging students at the highest levels of intellectual discovery and advancing diversity””

‘Advancing diversity’ by segregation. Sounds right out of 1984.

[Chgogal]

Absolutely true! Do not hire anyone with an Ivy League degree.