OBVIOUSLY A MAJOR MALFUNCTION.

I won't put this Inside Higher Ed passage in the same category of understatement as my title, which experienced readers will recognize from the day Challenger exploded.

Evergreen’s enrollment started dropping after the end of the financial crisis. To be sure, many colleges are dealing with low enrollment because of declining birth rates that have resulted in fewer Americans of traditional college age. But at Evergreen, enrollment has dropped by 1,000 students since 2017, to about 2,900, indicating something else might be at play. Of course, the strong progressive bent on campus might be a turn-off to some, especially after student protesters made national news in 2017 for occupying the president's office and calling for a professor to be fired.

The so-called progressives are learning another lesson, one that you'd think their older mentors might have raised, namely, that the only thing worse than grades and class ranks is the absence of grades and class ranks.

Now courses have been reorganized around 11 “paths of study,” with themes like political economy, math and computer science, food and agriculture, and Native American and indigenous programs. All courses will now be marked with their level, from introductory to advanced. The college, which has traditionally had a curriculum that changes every year, will now commit to a five-year plan of offerings.

That "political economy" course of study is probably heavy on Marx and light on Ricardo or Ely, but that's why we have school choice at the college level.

Read on, though, and note that history rhymes.

George Bridges, president of the college, said the student population at Evergreen now wants different things out of college than students who may have attended Evergreen in past decades. Evergreen’s acceptance rate is about 97 percent. The student population now has a high number of first-generation college students and military veterans. About half of all students are transfers from community colleges.

“They have a very different vision of what college would be and have different needs,” Bridges said. “They want to leave Evergreen with a degree they can use in a career, in a market,” and that’s explicable to employers. Students who attended in past decades grew up in a different economic climate, he said, and weren't seeking such specific outcomes.

Put another way, you can imagine no market tests, but you'd better conduct yourself as if your graduates are subject to market tests.