Economist Herbert Stein once famously said, when discussing the size of our national debt compared to GDP, “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. “US college costs just keep climbing,” Bloomberg reports. “And the increase is pushing the annual price for the upcoming academic year at Ivy League schools toward yet another hold-on-to-your-mortarboard mark: $90,000. Full costs at elite private colleges already stretch well into the $80,000s.” That’s well above what the typical American household earns in a year.

It’s a wonder our university system hasn’t yet bumped into Stein’s Law, and a wonder more folks haven’t had enough. “At some point, that math stops working out,” said Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an economist who focuses on higher education. “We get to a place where these degrees are just no longer worth it.”

Compounding these runaway costs is a growing mental health crisis on campus. A recent Gallup study found that 41% of college students have considered “stopping out” in the past six months, with 55% of those who’ve considered calling it quits citing emotional stress as a reason why.

So there’s the cost, and there’s the stress — although the latter seems to say more about the fragile state of our young people than the rigors of college. And then there’s the intrinsic appeal of a college education, which doesn’t seem to be what it once was.

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?”

Vedder’s point about the bloated bureaucracy is a good one. And nowhere is it more apparent than in the “diversity” industry that has infected colleges large and small with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staff up and down the hierarchy.

A 2021 report from The Heritage Foundation notes that many universities’ DEI programs “are bloated relative to academic pursuits and do not contribute to reported student well-being on campus.” The University of Michigan, for example, lists a whopping 163 staffers as having formal responsibility for providing DEI programming and services.

As for the breakdown of these, ahem, educational staff, Heritage writes: “Nineteen of those people work in a central office of DEI, headed by a Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion & Chief Diversity Officer, who is subsequently supported by three people with the title Assistant Vice Provost for Equity, Inclusion & Academic Affairs. Five people are listed in the Multicultural Center, another 24 are found in the Center for the Education of Women, and the LGBTQ Spectrum Center has 12 people. Eighteen people are listed on the Multiethnic Student Affairs website with another 14 found at the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives. Moreover, colleges and departments at the University of Michigan have their own DEI staff.”

Here’s another way to look at it: For every 14 people tasked with promoting DEI at the U of M, there is one person responsible for providing services to students with disabilities. And another way: Michigan has more than twice as many DEI staff as it does history faculty.

When one of the nation’s top-ranked public universities has 163 people on its payroll dedicated to “diversity,” it’s safe to assume that this university has not only failed to properly steward taxpayers’ money but, more fundamentally, has lost its way as an educational institution.

The American Spectator’s Dov Fischer weighed in on this DEI phenomenon as it pertained to the recent row at Stanford Law School, where an invited guest speaker, Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan, was disgracefully shouted down by dozens of future leftist lawyers and lectured by the school’s diversity officer, Tirien Steinbach, who was later suspended for her role in ginning up the mob. Fischer wrote: “These DEI deans are malignancies on the body academic, absolute poison. They get paid boatloads of money collected from overblown tuition, which saddles students and their parents with debt for life, to provide an ostensibly valuable service that my law degree, rabbinical degree, advanced history degree, and other educational attainments still leave me unable to fathom. What do these noxious DEI warts do to better society other than to promote reverse racism, divide people by ethnicities and skin color, in many cases promote anti-Semitism, and preach virtue-signaling effluvium that, once analyzed objectively between the lines, promote nothing but hate, the good woke kind of hate, hate for the values that once made America great?”

These are all great questions — whether about cost, value, wokeness, diversity, or misplaced priorities — and they don’t lend themselves to great answers.

No wonder so many young people are dropping out, and so many others are refusing to even drop in.

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.”