American Colleges Dying: Idea of University Hollowed Out

Colleges are the closest thing we have to progressive societies fully realized, and they increasingly exist as ends unto themselves. The decline of conservative representation among the professoriate is a decades-long phenomenon and has reached its terminus. Like medieval monasteries, progressive universities take it upon themselves to create an image of the perfect society and bring through themselves the blessings and moral transformation that will redeem the rest of the world. Many of them now invest more resources in managing student life than in educating young people and forming them to take up leadership roles in society, which was their original purpose. Johns Hopkins has 7.5 administrators for every professor. Yale has 5,000 managerial and professional staff even though it enrolled only 4,703 undergraduate students in a recent academic year. Every potential problem a student may have is met by not only a counselor but an entire bureaucracy. It’s as if the progressive blob wishes students to expect enormous and lavish bureaucracies to manage social interaction as a way of life, so that, when students leave campus, they recreate such authorities through human-resources departments and DEI offices in the corporate world, in the civic space, or in noncollege education.

So what does it say that, even with the enormous legal and financial preferments for their existence and success, these progressive utopias are dying faster than the society around them? College enrollment peaked and started to decline a decade ago. There was a variety of causes. Students were more skeptical about the value of college after the financial collapse and as tuition continued to soar above the general rate of inflation. The pandemic drove down enrollment even more. And now a bureaucratic snafu — the botched rollout of new federal financial-aid forms — is likely to kick off another plunge as students cannot figure out where they can afford to go. This story won’t end anytime soon. The population of college-aged students has begun to shrink in real terms as America settles in its long demographic slide toward where Japan is today (where a diaper-maker recently abandoned the infant market to focus on seniors).

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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Colleges are the closest thing we have to progressive societies fully realized, and they increasingly exist as ends unto themselves. The decline of conservative representation among the professoriate is a decades-long phenomenon and has reached its terminus. Like medieval monasteries, progressive universities take it upon themselves to create an image of the perfect society and bring through themselves the blessings and moral transformation that will redeem the rest of the world. Many of them now invest more resources in managing student life than in educating young people and forming them to take up leadership roles in society, which was their original purpose. Johns Hopkins has 7.5 administrators for every professor. Yale has 5,000 managerial and professional staff even though it enrolled only 4,703 undergraduate students in a recent academic year. Every potential problem a student may have is met by not only a counselor but an entire bureaucracy. It’s as if the progressive blob wishes students to expect enormous and lavish bureaucracies to manage social interaction as a way of life, so that, when students leave campus, they recreate such authorities through human-resources departments and DEI offices in the corporate world, in the civic space, or in noncollege education.

So what does it say that, even with the enormous legal and financial preferments for their existence and success, these progressive utopias are dying faster than the society around them? College enrollment peaked and started to decline a decade ago. There was a variety of causes. Students were more skeptical about the value of college after the financial collapse and as tuition continued to soar above the general rate of inflation. The pandemic drove down enrollment even more. And now a bureaucratic snafu — the botched rollout of new federal financial-aid forms — is likely to kick off another plunge as students cannot figure out where they can afford to go. This story won’t end anytime soon. The population of college-aged students has begun to shrink in real terms as America settles in its long demographic slide toward where Japan is today (where a diaper-maker recently abandoned the infant market to focus on seniors).