That’s what John Hinderaker provides for us in this PowerLine post.
Overwhelmingly, the news from academia is bad (or worse), so what is this good news? It’s that college enrollments continue to fall. Fewer students are being subjected to the steady barrage of leftist clichés and falsehoods about America that now composes such a large part of college at most schools.
Hinderaker writes, “Why the decline in ‘higher’ education? Rising costs, fueled in large part by a foolish government loan program, are obviously a major culprit. And those costs are running into growing doubts about the value of a degree. Part of the problem is that the quality of instruction has slipped badly. Moreover, a large majority of jobs don’t need a college degree, so if your motivation is financial, as it is for many people, the costs don’t make sense.”
Exactly.
Government policy has created a college bubble much as it created the housing bubble some 15 years ago. The Left benefited enormously from it, since it meant a huge increase in the flow of money into institutions it dominates plus the opportunity to influence the thinking of millions of students. No, college doesn’t turn every right-leaning student into a rabid Social Justice Warrior, but it tends to pull everything to the left, with the most pronounced impact on students who were already imbued with “progressive” beliefs when they graduated from high school.
The deflation of this bubble is indeed good news.