It seems fair to say that higher education has become an intellectual mosh pit, where young people who are charged top dollar to get in are free to bash into one another as they like while sages on the stages can perform to themselves and the venue owner cheerfully looks the other way so long as he’s getting paid.
It didn’t have to be this way. Stories of how we came to this point are the stuff of another day, but as to what comes next we’re starting to see signs that other people than the performers and venue owners are thinking hard about the future. Maybe market forces will have their sway after all.
The world might be better off without college for everyone is the banner in the recent Atlantic article, which talks openly about credential inflation that is running rampant in higher ed these days. And F.H. Buckley weighs in on the matter of tax credits for universities, asserting that it might be time to stop subsidizing the hard-left practices which are endemic here; doing otherwise, he asserts, would be the wrong way to save academia. Let market forces work their will.
We haven’t cleaned up our campus system. At some point the people who clean it up for us will be neither our customers nor our friends.