Once upon a time college was for things like learning and job training — shaping of the mind. Nowadays, you can get so much more — like shaping of the genitals. Gender-reassignment surgery is the latest luxery item to be added to the bloated list of educationally irrelevant services offered by our nation’s costly, debt-funded universities.
A number of elite private institutions, such as Duke and Yale, have recently added sex-change operations to the list of covered health-care procedures, raising student fees in order to pay for it. The operations and treatments can run higher than $50,000 for a single student.
Jennifer Kabbany reports at The College Fix that the University of Illinois at Chicago, a public university, has raised student fees in order to pay for student sex-change operations.
Public universities have a special public-interest mandate. Therfore, asking students and taxpayers to fork over more money to pay for such extragevantly expensive elective surgery strikes me as truly extraordinary — especially at a time when tuition costs and student debt levels are crippling the finances of countless American families.
When the winds of political correctness blow, college administrators are often the first to bend in obseisence. Politics, not public interest, is the motivating force. Meanwhile, parents and taxpayers are expected to pay for it all, no questions asked.