The Patriot Post® · The College Reckoning Cometh

A little more than three years ago, we penned a piece under an overly optimistic headline: “Is the Collegiate Death Spiral Coming Soon?”

We know, we know. It was wishful thinking.

“Our colleges and universities have for years,” we wrote, “grown unchecked by free-market principles, fully enabled by a corrupt deal between spiraling tuition costs and endless government subsidies. And all this while serving as leftist indoctrination camps for our children. It’s a noxious bubble that can’t burst soon enough.”

Since then, little has changed to improve the college experience. In fact, runaway student debt and rampant wokeism have made it even worse. It’d be bad enough if these institutions were cranking out debt-ridden little Maoists who were are least capable of making it in the modern world. But they’re not. A study published earlier this year in, appropriately enough, the journal Intelligence suggests that, for the first time in nearly 100 years, the American people’s average IQ is declining.

And get this: The greatest difference in annual IQ scores is in the 18-22 age group — the college age group. Not surprisingly, the study’s authors believe this decline might be related to the quality of edukation our studints iz getting. So the sales pitch for higher ed now goes something like this: Give us all your money, and we’ll use it to load up our pensions, grease the palms of Democrat politicians, and make you less intelligent.

It’s not exactly a bargain, is it?

A subsection of the American people has already incurred a stunning $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. When will enough be enough? According to CNBC, the days of easy student loans may be over: “Roughly two dozen schools have introduced ‘no-loan’ policies, which means they are eliminating student loans altogether from their financial aid packages.” The idea is that these schools can meet the financial needs of their students without loans.

It’s a start, we suppose. And perhaps that death spiral, that bursting of the higher-ed bubble, is instead coming in the form of a slow leak. One recent development is especially noteworthy. As Fox News reports: “American businesses are increasingly eliminating college degrees as part of their requirements for corporate roles, which is part of a wider trend in the U.S. job market that is de-emphasizing the value of a four-year diploma, according to experts. American companies like Walmart, IBM, Accenture, Bank of America, and Google have announced plans to reduce the number of jobs that require college degrees.” Here are some specifics:

Between 2017 and 2019, 46% of “middle-skill occupations” and 31% of “high-skill occupations” saw a drop in college degree requirements which “could have major implications for how employers find talent and open up opportunities for the two-thirds of Americans without a college education,” according to a report from the Burning Glass Institute. In line with the trend, the report projected the move could open up 1.4 million jobs for American workers without college degrees over the next five years.

The college degree had long ago become a substitute for the aptitude tests that many employers used to winnow their candidate fields. Now, perhaps, with the college degree having been exposed, employers will find new ways to determine their best job candidates.

As entrepreneur Ted Jenkin puts it: “If you are going to work for a tech company, what’s more important? A college degree or practical experience that you can code. It’s becoming clear with the out-of-control cost of college education that the very word ‘degree’ is getting watered down and companies want to hire people who can prove they can get things done.”

Why, it almost sounds like something Mike Rowe would say.

This revolution, or radical reform, is long overdue. Colleges and universities, with rare exceptions, have lost their way. As former Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder writes: “We have lost sight of the basics: Are our young learning a lot about things that prepare them to be responsible and productive citizens in the future? Are we downplaying the dissemination of truth and beauty in favor of spending resources on other things? For example, do universities really need umpteen bureaucrats who neither teach nor do research that might help future generations?”

Does the University of Michigan, for example, really need 163 employees with formal responsibility for providing so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programming and services?

Furthermore, do we really need a college degree to make it in the world? Three of the most successful businessmen in modern history — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg — all dropped out of college. Elon Musk, too, dropped out of his Ph.D. program, but, in fairness, the world’s richest African American credits his college years as “the time when his passions took off.”

Historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson saw the higher-ed reckoning coming years ago. “What,” he asked in 2019, “do widely diverse crises such as declining demography, increasing indebtedness, Generation Z’s indifference to religion and patriotism, static rates of home ownership, and a national epidemic of ignorance about American history and traditions all have in common? In a word, 21st-century higher education.”

As Professor Vedder concludes: “For years, the American public unflinchingly accepted the siren calls of the ‘college for all’ crowd: You will not succeed in life unless you go to college. They increasingly are rejecting that … [and] the trust in colleges being the path to opportunity in America has severely eroded.”

Economist Herb Stein once famously said of our national debt, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” That logic might appear obvious, but our nation’s colleges and universities have in recent decades seemed impervious to it.

Maybe now, Stein’s Law is finally exerting its influence.