The Pope Center’s intern this summer, Britney Wasserman, writes here about the decision she faced a few years ago when she was choosing which college to attend. Living in Florida at the time, she had been accepted at Florida State, but instead decided on the University of North Florida — for personal rather than academic reasons. That was a mistake, she soon found out, since the courses there were easier than her high-school courses had been, and few of the students took college seriously.
She doesn’t say this, but I think that implies that the faculty and administrators at UNF had made their peace with a largely disengaged student body and allowed academic standards to decline to a level matching the students’ interest in learning. That’s the case for a wide swath of American “higher education.” As Steve Balch says, we mostly just have longer education rather than higher education.