The Patriot Post® · Good News: Jordan Peterson's Higher-Ed Alternative

We’ve said it before: College is a racket. From soaring costs to rampant wokeness to misplaced educational priorities, the academy is, for many young Americans and their families, a waste of money.

These days, it’s little more than a cushy jobs program for leftists and other reliable Democrat voting blocs, and more people than ever are opting out in favor of better opportunities. Indeed, North Carolina Congresswoman Virginia Foxx has called the college-for-all idea a harmful myth. And a recent Gallup study found that 41% of college students have considered “stopping out” in the past six months.

Good for them.

College, though, still holds value and appeal for many young people, and it’s this group that Jordan Peterson sees as the target market for Peterson Academy, an online education platform that will launch in November.

What makes Peterson Academy different? Well, first and foremost, it’s devoid of ideology, and it focuses on teaching students how to think, not what to think. Second, it’s affordable. Very affordable. Rather than charging the obscene tuition costs of the typical university — tuition costs that, at the University of Michigan, for example, help to fund a whopping 163 staffers who provide so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programming and services — the goal of Peterson Academy is to offer a bachelor’s degree for only $4,000. That’s around 95% lower than an Ivy League school. Asked about that end cost, Peterson says, “We hope we can do it cheaper than that.”

“I’m not very happy with what the universities have done over the last, let’s say, 20 years,” Peterson told Fox News recently. “We’re trying to put a system online, Peterson Academy, that will drop the cost of a bachelor’s degree to $4,000. We think we can find the best lecturers in the world and bring them to people, and also instantiate a set of extremely, what would you say, severe and high-quality accreditation standards for the graduates so that people who graduate from our university will be stamped with a credential that indicates genuine competence, literacy, intelligence, conscientiousness and so forth. And I think that whole system is ripe for an extreme upset.”

Peterson says he already has 30 professors lined up.

Could it be that the time is right within the higher-ed industry for a revolutionary entrant such as the one Peterson is offering?

Perhaps so. As The Hill’s Daniel De Vise reports, “A popular narrative suggests young people are liberal and getting more liberal.” But, he continues, “Twelfth-grade boys are nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative versus liberal, according to a respected federal survey of American youth.”

These numbers represent a notable shift in the University of Michigan’s “Monitoring the Future” survey. As De Vise continues: “As recently as the late 2000s, liberal boys occasionally outnumbered conservative boys. Back in the Carter era, both boys and girls leaned liberal. Nowadays, it is girls who are drifting to the left. The share of 12th-grade girls who identified as liberal rose from 19 percent in 2012 to 30 percent in 2022. Only 12 percent of girls identified as conservative in last year’s survey.”

What is it with young girls? Is it time to reconsider women’s suffrage?

Kidding!

Fox News’s Steve Doocy asked Peterson if he was selling his academy as a way to think like him. To which Peterson replied, “No, I’m selling it as ‘If you want to think,’ period.”

“Bad as thinking is, not thinking is worse,” Peterson continued. “Think or die or suffer. Those are really your options. … When you think internally, what you’re really doing is setting an internal dialog up in your head. … You make yourself an enemy of the position that you hold, you let your enemy have his say, and you listen. … But most people think by talking, which is why free speech is so important, right? If you can’t speak freely, then you can’t think, and if you can’t think, then you suffer.”

And suffering is precisely what many listless, directionless young people are doing. “People who have nothing to shoot for aren’t happy,” said Peterson. “Because happiness actually is a consequence of moving toward something that you’re aiming for. So, no aim, no happiness. That’s another good thing for young people to know. Technically, technically, happiness occurs when you see yourself moving towards a valued goal. That’s how it works neuropsychologically. That’s how it works chemically. It’s an indication of progress towards a goal. So the higher your goal, the higher your possibility for happiness, even though you have to suffer from the distance. If you don’t set a goal, you’ll never be happy.”

Doocy also asked Peterson if there’s a political tilt to his bachelor’s program, but Peterson pushed back. “Not purposefully,” he said. “There hasn’t been a purposeful political tilt to anything that I’ve done. I’ve been just trying to say what I thought was true. It turns out that that tends to be more conservative now and in the climate that’s been generated politically.”

“That wasn’t purposeful,” he continued. “I never thought of myself as a conservative.”

Maybe not, but free speech, common sense, and educational integrity have increasingly come to be conservative values. And if Peterson can bring a dose of those values to his academy, he’ll be taking a much-needed sledgehammer to the ivory tower of American higher ed. And we have a feeling folks will flock to it.