HIGHER EDUCATION'S SELF-DESTRUCTION.

I've been documenting it for years.

For the two decades of Cold Spring Shops posts, one message that I have stayed on almost obsessively is higher education going wrong by offering a sub-prime product.  I've come to the conclusion that the U.S. News problem exists in part because parents and students recognize much of higher education is a sham.  Now if higher education types would see it.  "Recognizing the problem is the first step toward fixing it."

Perhaps, reality is dawning.  A recent Higher Education Politics & Economics article is encouraging, from my perspective, although it suggests morale in the classroom is shot.  "To account for their participation in eroding standards, faculty refer to trends in the wider economy and culture that we dub the 'broke-woke-stroke' convergence."

Slowly, the shakeout of excess capacity proceeds.

I'm not surprised that when the people running higher education trash their own value proposition, nothing good comes of it.  "Lest we forget, the responsibilities of the professor include saying no and upholding standards.  Institutions that respect that sort of discipline are more likely to survive the shakeout of excess capacity that is under way." We're still in the discontinue the accommodation trains and put more head end on the limiteds stage of the shakeout, but we're in a shakeout all the same.

And the Modern Language Association continue to be blithely self-destructing.  Graham Hillard filed a report from New Orleans.  Sometimes Karneval opens even before Three Kings.

“But so what?” you say. “The academic humanities have for years been a hive of deconstruction, obscurantism, and self-reference. Of course the MLA conference is 99 percent inside baseball! Of course it has a “land acknowledgement”! Of course its 2025 theme—“Visibility”—tracks perfectly with leftist concerns that we might forget the plight of indigenous transgender atheists for five minutes!”

And the association's antics drag down the academic enterprise more generally.

Of course, not every MLA conference-goer is a highbrow deviant who lacks even the courage of his strange convictions. Nor is every attendee a joyless thought-policer tripping on Marxist theory. The fact remains, though, that ham-and-eggers like me paid for these guys’ hotel rooms. Whether through taxes or tuition, we sponsored the whole outlandish show. While few would draw a direct line between MLA malfeasance and declining trust in colleges, it is no great leap to blame the MLA mindset for English departments’ sorry straits. Once the public decides that literature profs are frivolous weirdos who hate the books we’ve actually heard of, well, it’s hard to un-ring that bell.

And perhaps the rollback of indirect cost returns on government grants accordingly resonates more with the Normals.  "Next week, 5,000 highly credentialed pedants will gather in the Crescent City for four days of backscratching and accusation. Let’s get busy reforming higher ed without them."

Reform, or perhaps shut down a few underperforming colleges.

It takes a certain IQ to handle college-level work, despite exaggerated claims about the role that grit plays. It’s generally believed that an IQ of about 115 is necessary. The large number of freshmen who drop out each year serves as evidence that many are academically in over their heads.

Such students would have been much better served if they had pursued a vocational curriculum and an apprenticeship. Instead, they were led to believe that, without a bachelor’s degree, their future was bleak. Even worse, some of the colleges they enrolled in were colleges in name only, in fact little more than residential high schools. As a result, such institutions’ closures were a blessing for students who would have been saddled with debt for a worthless degree.

The closures in question were partly due to Covid, but that masks a more fundamental reason: Americans have soured in their view of higher education. Last year’s much-remarked-upon Lumina-Gallup study found that fewer than half believe it is doing a good job. They question the overall value of a four-year degree. This skepticism has been slow in developing but is understandable in light of new realities. When most young people’s formal education ended with high-school graduation, anyone with a bachelor’s degree had a distinct leg up in finding and keeping a well-paying job. But today, the proliferation of colleges and myriad majors have created a totally different situation. In fact, “college graduates with poor academic performance, graduating in the bottom quartile of their class, earn roughly the same after graduation as high school graduates,” according to Restoring the Promise, by economist Richard Vedder.

That means that unless colleges can find a way to meet the unique needs and interests of today’s younger generation, they face an uphill battle in staying in business. Their job shouldn’t be to funnel as many high-school graduates as possible onto their campuses but instead to make college available only to those who have the demonstrated wherewithal to profit from the experience. So far, they have not been successful. It’s unlikely they ever will be as long as they persist in believing that college is for everyone (or in feigning that belief for financial purposes). When students learn they are ill-prepared to handle rigorous college-level material, they drop out, often with their self-esteem shattered or with heavy debt. Admitting unqualified students only sets such students up for failure. That should serve as a reality check for higher education, but it hasn’t.

Implementing reality, notes the editorialists at New York's Post, is going to take time and work.

Instead of relying on legal or regulatory thunderbolts from on high, the [Manhattan Institute} study advocates for a far more realistic strategy.

It’s far more important, they argue, to fill low-profile but bureaucratically key posts like that of provost with allies than for the president to loudly and publicly champion merit-based, rigorous educational standards.

And that will be true on down the line of any university administration: quiet, steady work from within beats showboating every time.

The study also advocates — correctly — for a massive cutdown on administrative spending and staffing. The authors estimate that the majority of schools could trim as much as 50% on the admin side.

This will not only open up some of those anti-reform chokepoints but also give faculty a greater stake in actually running the places where they teach.

Unfortunately, faculty abdicated much of that responsibility to Student Affairs long ago, and there are fewer tenured faculty to exercise stewardship by serving on committees or doing a hitch as dean or provost than there used to be.  What happened next was not amusing.

Higher education has already sacrificed its moral authority by crushing free inquiry, by racist admissions practices, and by the ideological capture of many its departments by an explicitly anti-western creed. It has also already bent a knee to federal power when the Obama administration demanded that campuses restrict the campus due-process rights of those accused of sexual assault. In short, higher education likes to market itself as a magical oasis of inquiry and wonder, but it really has already sold its soul to those who wield power. Perhaps if [Deborah] Lipstadt had done a title search she would have understood.

The past few years have been a debacle for higher education. The antisemitism on campuses. Plagiarism scandals. The most damaging was the Biden student debt forgiveness brouhaha totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, because that 1) forced all Americans to pay off the debts of the privileged and 2) showed that higher education is a bad personal investment.

The federal government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on higher education just over the last few years. For what? A repressive ideological, mostly anti-American monoculture that serves as a debt trap for students. For higher education, the calls of chaos are coming from inside the house.

Perhaps my Chicago Boyz colleague Mike is correct: "It’s time for us perhaps not to have a purge of higher education, that’s how the Left operates, but perhaps a colonic."

Or some sort of emetic.  What's instructive is how the folks at the all-wokeness-all-the-time Inside Higher Ed couch their roundup of recent retrenchments.

The latest installment of Inside Higher Ed’s monthly roundup of personnel and program cuts at colleges finds those changes largely propelled by financial issues tied to the usual suspects: declining enrollment and rising operational costs.

Those "rising operational costs" are in part self-inflicted: hive off a few diversity deanlets once.  The declining enrollments will be harder to fix.  Demography is part of destiny; deconstructing your value proposition in the name of the Modern Language Association is a choice.