Go back 60 years, and higher education in America was rightly esteemed. Academic standards were high; costs were pretty low. School officials were almost always scholars who cared deeply about the educational enterprise. All of that has changed dramatically.
What went wrong?
Economist Arnold Kling has an excellent analysis in this post.
As Kling sees it, the root of the problem is that universities, eager to enroll as many students as possible, started to adopt the values of the marginal students they wanted while abandoning their own.
He writes, “I want to suggest that one of the causal factors in the decline of the university was the goal of expanding access to higher education. Universities began to enroll populations with different values and thought processes. Rather than assimilate these ‘new immigrants’ into the native culture of elite scholarship, the universities suffered from reverse assimilation: they gave up their core values as they adapted to the culture of the new arrivals.”
I say he’s nailed the truth.
When the “college is for everyone” notion began to settle in, college leaders felt the need to admit lots of weak and disengaged students. But it wouldn’t do to let them flunk out, so colleges had to change.
Key paragraph:
Instead of instilling into the new arrivals the culture of the institutions, the institutions accommodated the new arrivals. They dumbed down their curriculum to enable less qualified students to obtain diplomas. They limited free inquiry in order to appease women’s higher levels of emotional sensitivity. And they created the DEI bureaucracy both to employ minority administrators and to put pressure on professors and admissions officers to apply disparate standards to minority students.
The immense waste and folly we see on most of our college campuses these days stem from that reverse assimilation.
Read the whole thing.