My son says “College is bullshit” — and he’s only 10 years old — my physician told me. The boy had already decided he would not go, and his father, an Ivy League graduate with a prestigious specialty practice, was uncertain how to respond. He said to me, tentatively: “Okay, he has to graduate from high school, but then…Well, he has to do something, but not necessarily college.” I could hear the bewilderment in his voice.
The young man’s sentiment is crudely expressed, but it captures a spreading sense of rebellion, an undercurrent of disillusionment. As the cost of college skyrockets, students and families wonder if the promise of higher education is still being kept. And with many graduates underemployed or burdened with debt, or both, they have reason to ask.
Public opinion polls seem to affirm this. A 2023 Gallup poll found that only 41 percent of US adults believed a college degree is “very important” — down from 70 percent in 2013. Among 18–29 year-olds, that number was even lower. And a 2022 ECMC Group survey of teens (ages 14–18) reportedly found that only 48 percent said they were likely to pursue a four-year degree, down from 71 percent in 2020. And 42 percent believed success could be achieved through alternative pathways, including apprenticeships, bootcamps, or starting their own business.
What has happened, my doctor was asking. Why is the price sticker for college so shocking, today? Sure, he said, I can afford it, but what does it deliver?
More College ≠ More Education
In 1940, only 4.6 percent of Americans had a college degree. College was for the elite, those who could pay and a few fortunate scholarship winners. After World War II, the GI Bill enabled large numbers of working-class Americans to enter college. Mass higher education became political policy and a social expectation.
By 2020, four out of ten Americans had a college degree of some kind. Community colleges, private universities, public universities, liberal arts colleges, institutes and academies, and for-profit institutions were serving a vastly wider demand. For decades, a rapid democratization unfolded and was greeted as a national achievement and strength. As of the 2023–24 academic year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, the United States had 2,691 four-year degree-granting institutions. There were 1,496 two-year institutions, including community colleges and junior colleges primarily granting associate degrees and certificates.
But even as it became the default path for men and women alike, college became increasingly administratively bloated, unabashedly ideological with confusing options of increasingly less value after college, and, for many, shockingly expensive.
“Between 1993 and 2009, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent, a rate ten times faster than that of tenured faculty positions.” Today, many universities employ more administrators than professors. Student affairs officers, DEI coordinators, wellness directors, marketing teams, and “engagement specialists” now populate campuses. Few directly contribute to teaching or learning. The Harvard Crimson reported in “Fire Them All; God Will Know His Own,” that Harvard employs 7,024 full-time administrators, a number closely matching its undergraduate population.
Top colleges compete not just in academics but in amenities: gourmet dining halls, lazy rivers, climbing walls, luxury dorms. It’s common for new campus buildings to cost $500–700 per square foot. These upgrades appeal to prospective students, but they bloat the budget. In addition, colleges spend heavily on name branding, rankings manipulation, and student recruitment — none of which lowers costs.
The Demographic Earthquake
And beneath many colleges there is a demographic earthquake threatening. Too few applicants. Between 2010 and 2021, the number of US undergraduates dropped by nearly 15 percent. The birthrate decline after 2008 means fewer high-school graduates are entering the college pipeline. By the fall of 2025, the so-called “enrollment cliff” will hit many regions hard — especially the Midwest and Northeast.
Simple economics: supply (college classroom seats) is outpacing demand. This surplus is especially pronounced among small private colleges and second-tier universities. Many now compete for the same students — not with lower list prices, but with luxurious amenities and aggressive tuition discounting. In 2023, the average tuition discount rate at private colleges reached 56 percent. That means for every $50,000 sticker price, the average student paid about $22,000.
Does this help? Well, it enables schools to practice price discrimination — charging wealthier families more while offering discounts to others. But this distortion creates the illusion that college is even more unaffordable than it often is.
The “Bennett Hypothesis,” advanced by former Department of Education Secretary William Bennett in the 1980s, is that federal aid fuels tuition inflation. Between 2000 and 2020, student loan debt ballooned from $240 billion to $1.6 trillion. In 2023 alone, the US federal government disbursed $112 billion in direct student aid, including Pell Grants and federal student loans. State and local governments added another $110 billion in direct support to public colleges.
This government cornucopia has enabled colleges and universities to hugely “bulk up” their bureaucracies, charge much higher tuition and other costs to facilitate their “redistribution of wealth” from richer families to poorer (most “minority”) families, and direct a lot of alumni and other private contributions to appealing amenities.
Revolution: The Core Curriculum
There is another species of inflation. When college was rare, graduates were an elite. Today, they are the norm. Employers now require degrees for roles once filled by people with a high-school diploma. About half of recent college grads are underemployed or working jobs that don’t require a degree — baristas, retail clerks, or customer service reps.
The ideological agenda of higher education has resulted in conversion of much of the core curriculum to postmodernist ideology, loosely termed “political correctness” and Neo-Marxism. Liberal arts programs have been shedding classical disciplines — logic, rhetoric, moral philosophy, history — for courses focused on identity politics, power structures, and postmodernist/Marxist critiques of Western (especially American) history, economies (that is, capitalism), society, politics, and the arts. While there are admittedly jobs for well-trained, committed cadres of postmodernist activism, the classes offer no preparation for most real jobs. How many staff writers does the Atlantic or the New Yorker need, after all? A graduate fluent in the works of the French Communist Party founder of “postmodernism,” Jacques Derrida, may not be fluent in Excel.
As Professor Stephen Hicks, author of the modern classic Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, summarizes it: “Postmodernism became the leading intellectual movement in the late 20th century. It has replaced modernism, the philosophy of the Enlightenment. For modernism’s principles of objective reality, reason, and individualism, it has substituted its precepts of relative feeling, social construction, and groupism. This substitution has now spread to major cultural institutions such as education, journalism, and the law, where it manifests itself as race and gender politics, advocacy journalism, political correctness, multiculturalism, and the rejection of science and technology.”
Heather Mac Donald, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, accuses universities of abandoning their core educational mission to peddle ideological orthodoxy. “The university has become an engine of identity politics, obsessed with race, gender, and oppression, rather than with the pursuit of truth.” How may soaring costs be related to ideology? She writes that “…federal money that goes into student loans is driving a huge part of the tuition increases and those in turn keep the bureaucracy growing. And Title IX has led to the creation of completely unnecessary offices in every university….I think that this is fundamentally an ideological issue and that the bureaucracy merely follows. This is driven by something much deeper, which is a hatred for Western civilization….The ‘real world’ now features the same insane search for its own racism and sexism.”
Likewise, Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, has long argued and adduced evidence that too many people in academia today are not educating students to think for themselves, but indoctrinating them with politically correct dogmas. “There are no institutions in America where free speech is more severely restricted than in our politically correct colleges and universities, dominated by liberals…”
Both scholars say preaching ideology has sapped both the intellectual rigor of a classical education and the real-world value of a liberal arts degree — at least for employers prioritizing competence over left activism. Tech, healthcare, logistics, finance, and skilled trades are where job growth lies. And they require actual skills — data analysis, coding, medical certification, and supply chain expertise.
Too many liberal arts grads lack quantitative competence and practical experience. Not all degrees are created equal. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields with majors such as accounting, mechanical engineering, cybersecurity, laboratory technician, nursing, and software developer have among the highest job placement rates, often 90 percent-plus within six months of graduation. Liberal arts, humanities, and most social sciences trail far behind.
Schools And Degrees That May Work for Work
As for practical experience, institutions with strong co-op programs or industry ties — Northeastern, Purdue, or Georgia Tech for three examples almost at random — can often place students into jobs more reliably than more prestigious but less career-oriented universities. Thus internships, mentorships, project portfolios, and networking matter more than ever but are relegated to extracurricular activities, not the core curriculum.
There is no dearth of statements and studies making this point. Just one, a study by American Student Assistance (ASA) and Jobs for the Future, reported that 81 percent of employers prioritize skills over degrees when evaluating candidates. Additionally, 72 percent of employers believe a degree isn’t a reliable indicator of a candidate’s quality. That study is cited by a technology publication with a vested interest in special training versus degrees, but the sentiment is to be seen everywhere. A June 9, 2023, Bloomberg headline ran “LinkedIn Bets on Skills Over Degrees as Future Labor Market Currency.”
Not surprisingly, we get statistics like this from a 2022 report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce: Engineering, Computer Science, and Health Professions majors had some of the highest return on investment (ROI), with lifetime earnings exceeding $3 million in some fields. By contrast, majors in the Arts, Education, and Psychology often resulted in lifetime earnings under $2 million. A bachelor’s degree in Petroleum Engineering had the highest median ROI, with graduates earning more than $120,000 per year. A degree in Liberal Arts or Visual Arts often correlated with median earnings below $40,000 per year in the early career phase.
How useful? Probably also true, in broad strokes, in 18th century Paris. Artists on the Left Bank versus engineers in Napoleon’s armed forces. Yes, it invites satire. But today, the liberal arts have been systematically degraded by ideological indoctrination.
And finally, there is something that most of us sense in our daily lives. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that many skilled trade careers that require two years or less of training, — electricians, HVAC technicians, and dental hygienists — lead to median salaries of $50,000–$80,000, often without debt. Many of these majors can be pursued at community colleges, where, according to the American Association of Community Colleges, almost 40 percent of US undergraduates get their higher education. Often, these are programs that combine certifications, hands-on apprenticeships, and industry partnerships — not college degrees — but lead directly to employment in such fields as healthcare, information technology, and skilled manufacturing.
Costs, Opportunity and Otherwise
Back to my physician’s son: his rejection of college reflects a new cynicism among Gen Z. Perhaps they’ve watched their siblings and cousins graduate with debt, move home, and work menial jobs. Or been watching viral TikToks about “useless” degrees. Few perhaps could say why college is not what it once was, but their intuition is not wrong. For many, it has become a high-stakes gamble, not an investment.
Parents and students scouting colleges have a few moves available that do not cut to the core of the problem, but ameliorate it. For example, region matters. Tuition tends to be lower at public universities in the South and West, higher in the Northeast. In the deep South, excluding Florida, colleges and universities have maintained more traditional curricula and lower-cost models, foregoing big research establishments and international prestige. There are reports, of course, of Florida and Texas actively pushing back against postmodernist, politically correct ideology, promoting technical skills, and being transparent about costs. And, as an all-too-reliable generalization, institutions in California and the Northeast tend to emphasize diversity initiatives — and charge higher tuition to sustain larger bureaucracies.
So college can still be worth it and a degree still correlates with higher lifetime earnings. But your major, the institution, and career planning count for a lot. A BS degree in Nursing from a state university? A BA degree in Gender Studies from a small private college with no job placement services? Those are two scarcely comparable discussions of a college education. There are popular questions and formulas that families are urged to apply: What is the college’s job placement rate by major? What is the average debt load for graduates? The actual net price after all aid? How much emphasis is put on internships and other career preparation?
“Financed by Businessmen”
Arguably, the only force that might make colleges rethink their role — making a renewed and consistent commitment to admission on merit, intellectual rigor, marketable skills, and education of future professionals instead of ideological cadres — is private philanthropy’s boycott, the beginnings of which we saw when students at elite colleges demonstrated en masse for Hamas and against Israel after October 7.
As long as Harvard can count on 30,000 alumni gifts a year, and gifts as large as $400 million (in 2015 from hedge fund CEO John Paulson), the administration and the status quo are fortified. The rethinking begins when Leon Cooperman, a 1967 graduate in business from Columbia University, now a billionaire hedge fund manager who contributed $25 million to support the construction of the Manhattanville campus, declares in an interview on Fox News he will no longer contribute to Columbia after the massive demonstration of Students for Justice in Palestine and a recent rise in antisemitism.
“I think these kids at the colleges have sh*t for brains,” Cooperman said, when asked about the demonstration and similar ones at Harvard, Stanford, NYU, and many other colleges across the country. “I have no idea what these young kids are doing.”
“The real shame is I’ve given to Columbia probably about $50 million over many years,” Cooperman added. “And I’m going to suspend my giving. I’ll give my giving to other organizations.”
Call it “activism” by “capital” or “businessmen,” because that is what it is. It has been an extraordinarily long time in coming. As usual, Ayn Rand put it in unequivocal terms:
The sources and centers of today’s philosophical corruption are the universities… It is the businessmen’s money that supports American universities — not merely in the form of taxes and government handouts, but much worse: in the form of voluntary, private contributions, donations, endowments, etc.
All I can say is only that millions and millions and millions of dollars are being donated to universities by big business enterprises every year, and that the donors have no idea of what their money is being spent on or whom it is supporting. What is certain is only the fact that some of the worst anti-business, anti-capitalism propaganda has been financed by businessmen in such projects.
