College increasingly makes less and less sense for more and more high school graduates. Being indoctrinated in the latest Leftism for four years, and graduating with a debt of between 25-50k, is a poor proposition. Colleges were in decay even when I got my two degrees from the U of I back in 75-82, but there was much less debt and much less Leftist BS. When an institution loses sight of its primary function, it will turn to serving the interests of those who control it. Thus colleges now largely exist to serve as a job source for administrators, often politically connected to the Democrat party, and their unionized staff, and to promote the political beliefs embraced by said groups. Students, and their education, are very much tertiary considerations, if that. You can still find good colleges, and determined scholars can still get a good education at the most unpromising institutions, but college, overall, is increasingly a bad choice, often disastrously so.
Thirteen years ago, Thomas Sowell (a national treasure, bless him) published Economic Facts and Fallacies. In his conclusion to the chapter on ‘Academic Facts and Fallacies’ he wrote:
” Many of the economic and educational decisions made at colleges and universities seem inexplicable as the actions of institutions pursuing either the best interests of the students or the best interests of the institutions themselves. However, the actions of academic institutions are much more readily understood as responses to the incentives and constraints facing the various autonomous decision-makers such as professors, administrators, trustees, athletic coaches and others pursuing their own self-interests. Such internal conflicts of interest with the overall purposes of the institution as a whole are much more readily constrained in a profit-seeking enterprise, where the difference between profit and loss is the difference between survival and extinction— and where stockholders and outside financial institutions react quickly to both the short-run and long-run implications of decisions made within profit-seeking enterprises.”
” … While much can be concealed from corporate stockholders, what is hard to conceal is the bottom line— how the profitability of a given company compares to the profitability of other companies in the same or other industries. There is no such bottom line in the non-profit academic world, either financially or in terms of the education produced. Institutional investors in academic institutions are often other non-profit organizations such as foundations or government agencies, which themselves lack the personal stakes which business investors have.”
Great post, Don, and Clinton, thanks for the enlightening quotation from the vastly underrated Prof. Sowell. Both are spot on.
I may have mentioned here before that one of my nieces, who graduated from high school last spring, is now learning the carpentry trade as a union apprentice. (She lives in Illinois, so there are very few opportunities to learn any construction trade outside of a union environment. But her uncle the retired labor lawyer gave her a few tips on dealing with that milieu. 😁) She will very soon be out-earning her parents, individually, and in a few years probably exceeding their combined incomes. And, most importantly, she is having a blast, in her own words. School was a bore for her, and she got Honor Roll grades without really trying very hard. Now she feels as if she is learning to do something productive and lasting.
The state legislatures could do much to ameliorate matters. They do nothing.