Federal policy has been pushing college education since the days of Lyndon Johnson. As a result, far more students go to college, learn much less, and wind up deeply in debt. It’s a great illustration of the way government policies usually have unintended, harmful consequences. A few skeptics like Charles Murray and Richard Vedder argued that we were blowing a huge bubble with federal intervention.
It seems that the bubble is now bursting, or at least deflating significantly. So argue Jason Bedrick and Adam Kissel here.
They point to surveys showing that employers now often see a college degree as a negative in an applicant. The authors write, “Why? One respondent complained that college graduates ‘typically have an incompatible ideology with my business culture.’ College students indoctrinated in ‘intersectionality’ and ‘critical gender studies’ who are trained to spot ‘microaggressions’ in every mundane interaction do not, it seems, make for sought-after employees.”
Yup. College grads are far less likely than in the past to have skills in the areas that employers need and far more likely to have attitudes and beliefs that are detrimental. Who wants to deal with workers like that? College students are exposed day in and day out to professors who are deeply hostile to America’s traditions, including free enterprise, and rarely hear anything in defense of those traditions.
Perhaps, within a few years, a lot of those professors and administrators who latched on to comfy careers in academia on the bandwagon of “progressivism” will find themselves looking for jobs where they have to produce value. They’re going to be in trouble.