What the exposure of the rot at Harvard and other privileged academic giants in America offers is an opportunity for private third-level educational excellence.
Commentary
Those who have been fighting the toxic radicalism that has come to control higher education have little time to run a victory lap after the startling departure of Claudine Gay as Harvard’s president this month over the toleration of anti-Semitism, allegations of scholarly plagiarism, and doubts about her qualifications.
The diversity activist’s forced resignation came less than a month after University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill was pressured to step down in the aftermath of disastrous congressional
testimony that asserted that determining if calling for the genocide of Jews was a violation of Penn’s code of conduct “is a context-dependent decision.”
The journalists, politicians, and think tanks who brought the information to light that doomed Ms. Gay and Ms. Magill are busy
strategizing on making the most of these breakthroughs for future political and public policy wins. However, something much bigger is cooking: a populist reevaluation of higher education driven by business.
The COVID-19 lockdowns sharpened public dissatisfaction with the outrageous
cost of a degree and the exploitation for ideological ends of the prestige of having a couple of letters after your name. Government-backed student loans have, for decades, allowed colleges to skyrocket their tuition far above the inflation rate. The decline in enrollments in 2022 actually significantly
exceeded that of 2021, and what’s most telling is that the cheaper option of community college suffered the largest drop, close to 8 percent. Most Americans, particularly the young, now
believe that getting a degree isn’t worth it.
For many years, a movement for alternative higher education has been gaining, but the
assault upon it from the educational establishment and the left in general has been unrelenting. That resistance has been largely successful up to now, but the smart money is on the left-ruled educational establishment ultimately being upended in their dominance, what with the spectacle of some of their most eminent overseers being exposed on camera as moral buffoons.
At the heart of the matter is a betrayal in regard to underlying purpose. The prized degree, this purported pearl of great price that parents give much of what they own to buy, is supposed to make your kid a highly educated person who won’t ever have to earn a living stocking the aisles at Walmart. It’s advertised as the American Dream for sale. InsideHigherEd.com last year
characterized what students now do as “suffering and sacrifice in the name of a reward,” but upon arriving “on the other side of the college years and [having] seen that ... whoops! ... there are not a lot of rewards here, they are understandably disillusioned.”
In fact, college has oftentimes become brainwashing, with the primary end of making sure that as many graduates whose money the institution fleeces do as their professors do on Election Day; being well-read means voting blue. And those shelling out the dough are wising up. As Cardinal John Newman, author of “The Idea of a University,” remarked, “Self-education in any shape, in the most restricted sense, is preferable to a system of teaching which, professing so much, really does so little for the mind.”
How little? Harvard Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, an English professor, in 2022 told
The New Yorker of how, in teaching the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, “my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.” She rationalized it with the remark that “the 19th century is a long time ago.” You heard right: Harvard. As of last year, you can actually get an English literature degree from Harvard without taking a single poetry course.
If we get down to brass tacks, employers hire college graduates because the letters after their name assure that they’re literate. And literate people—those who can and do read non-trash books—are equipped to be trained to work jobs requiring a significant degree of intellectual prowess, often if not usually having little or nothing to do with what they studied in the classroom and library.
Right now, however, it’s conceivable that anyone in the world can “go to college” for free, though not end up with a degree at the end of doing so. Arizona State University (ASU), YouTube, and learning channel Crash Course joined together in 2020 to
provide four core requirement classes that are no charge to watch. ASU has even partnered with Starbucks, which actually recruits employees by offering to pay for an online-earned bachelor’s degree.
The Ivy League and other long-established colleges and universities are themselves moving away from traditional, humanities-oriented education toward studies focusing on technologies of one kind or another, in essence high-income job training—but accompanied by the modern liberal arts faculty’s left-wing indoctrination. So why wouldn’t anyone look around for high-end job training that’s cheaper and faster?
For-profit educational institutions, notwithstanding the war waged against them by an educational establishment that ought to be classified as for-profit itself considering the money it squeezes from both its students and the government—
more than a trillion dollars from the taxpayers—can be found imparting knowledge not offered by the Harvards and the Princetons. A teacher at New York’s for-profit Berkeley College, founded in 1931, who was a veteran of the health care industry, for instance, was found
instructing low-income students in the details of how to ace job interviews, plus an array of expectations of those working at high levels within corporations.
So why are for-profit colleges’ reputations so
firmly ensconced in the
gutter? Just as “nonprofit” colleges’ greed has rendered them as filthy rich as some of the most successful hedge fund managers, for-profit higher education has been
described as “a world of large companies that derive most of their income—upward of 75%, typically—from government subsidies.”
The worst performing of New York State’s for-profit schools get tens of millions of dollars in state subsidies—a taxpayer-financed fortune for institutions where a majority of students don’t actually bother paying any of their debt back, no doubt in some cases because the jobs they end up having after their studies don’t provide enough income.
What the televised exposure of the rot at Harvard and other privileged academic giants in America offers is an opportunity for private third-level educational excellence untethered to either the ideology of today’s academic establishment or to the governmental financial teat.
It’s time for entrepreneurs to establish an array of colleges of both intellectual and vocational bent—refusing any form of government assistance at the federal or state level, perhaps even forming a new accreditation authority—with private banks responsible for their student loans. Organized properly by men and women of integrity, such a venture can forge the future of higher education.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
