Higher Education is Overpriced Mediocrity

“Not all knowledge comes from college.” – Mike Rowe, of TV’s “Dirty Jobs”

In fact, in certain collegiate “academic disciplines,” knowledge and scholarship are in terribly short supply.

However, most American campuses have surpluses of overpaid, nonessential, non-academic, ideology-driven “administrators” supported by nearly limitless institutional access to federal student loan funding that enables colleges to push tuition costs far above the rate of inflation, while avoiding accountability and, in too many cases, returning scant value to indebted kids and families.

More Rowe: “[A] trillion dollars of student loans and a massive skills gap are precisely what happens to a society that actively promotes one form of education as the best course for the most people. … [T]he stigmas and stereotypes that keep so many people from pursuing a truly useful skill, begin with the mistaken belief that a four-year degree is somehow superior to all other forms of learning.”

Today, the government advances student loan money it doesn’t have, so colleges and universities can “train” young victims who can’t pay it back for jobs that don’t, never did or will exist.

Schools offer soft, often valueless programs like “Foresight” (really!), and “Gender,” “Queer,” “Ethnic,” “Cultural,” – anything ending in – “Studies,” among others, and silly “coursework” like “Tree Climbing,” “Getting Dressed” (both Ivy League offerings), “How to Watch Television,” “The Art of Walking,” “Women and Politics,” “The Politics of Protest,” and, ironically, considering institutional suppression of conservative speech, a “Freedom of Expression Seminar.”

Hundreds more do nothing to prepare kids for the real world. Instead, they indoctrinate poorly-educated students into an alternate “reality” that produces hard-left, pseudo-religious “woke” social justice activists convinced that sheepskins alone confirm their intellectual and moral superiority.

That “certified” sense of “superiority” is what passes for “value” in much of higher education today.

Nonetheless, many non-introspective, even un- and under-employed graduates who buy that fiction condescend and dictate to productive, albeit non-degreed people who want to be left alone.

Distinguished American intellectual, economist, and social philosopher Dr. Thomas Sowell stated: “Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.”

And: “Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.”

Sowell’s critical appraisals of higher education aren’t unique. H.L. Mencken once wrote: “It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a PhD will thereby cease to be a moron,” and Joseph Sobran has noticed that, “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college.”

Clearly, academic standards have slipped.

But schools’ administrative standards have slipped, too, arguably even more seriously.

For example, as a byproduct of her reluctance to condemn campus anti-Semitism, Harvard’s President Claudine Gay was recently revealed to be a serial plagiarist. Her entire academic portfolio, already thin, may be discredited by repeated violations of that foundation of academic integrity.

Former President Barack Obama interceded, and 700 woke Harvard faculty members defended her, so Gay stayed, even though donors were abandoning Harvard, and early admittance applications declined.

To be fair, undisciplined, anti-Semitic, sometimes violent pro-Hamas demonstrations occurred on other liberal campuses, too. After all, according to Sowell, “In the academic world, diversity means black leftists, white leftists, female leftists, and Hispanic leftists. Demographic diversity conceals ideological conformity.”

In that context, higher education’s hive-mind preoccupation with ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)’ would have saved Gay. After all, she’s 1) black, 2) female, 3) a Harvard “historical first,” and, most importantly, 4) an expression of DEI “virtue,” so genuine merit was never a job prerequisite.

Ultimately, though, DEI was trumped (sort of) by an imperative for Gay’s “resignation” (citing “racial animus”) to preserve Harvard’s coveted “prestige,” a goal compromised by keeping manifestly-guilty, unrepentant plagiarist Gay on faculty at president’s pay.

Overall, the value proposition of higher education has declined precipitously.

In July, Gallup released a poll finding that few Republican/Republican-leaning independents expressed confidence in higher education. Only 59 percent of Democrats/leaners felt confidence.

Markets work: If three-quarters of one-half of potential enrollees and 40 percent of the other half distrust higher ed, reputational – and economic – consequences are certain.

https://www.pottsmerc.com/2024/01/08/jerry-shenk-higher-education-is-overpriced-mediocrity/