The Trump administration’s efforts to reform higher education have been met with increasing resistance from the higher education establishment. Indeed, arguably the most prestigious university of all—Harvard—sued the Trump administration in late-April for freezing over $2 billion in federal research funding because Harvard refused to comply with a list of conditions for the continued receipt of federal monies. Harvard sued the Trump administration again in late May over what Harvard avers is an “unlawful and unwarranted” foreign student ban. If that weren’t contentious enough, a few days before Harvard filed the April lawsuit, hundreds of college and university presidents, including Harvard’s, signed a group letter condemning what they contend is the “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” that higher ed is facing under the Trump administration. Clearly, American higher education is at a crossroads.
Importantly, a growing chorus of scholars, former college presidents, economists, and legal experts is sounding the alarm, but not in a fashion that the higher ed establishment wants to hear. Four recent books, each from different corners of the intellectual and policy spectrum, converge on a shared conclusion. Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt’s The Great Upheaval, Brian Rosenberg’s Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, Richard Vedder’s Let Colleges Fail, and Ilya Shapiro’s Lawless offer damning indictments of the current state of American higher education. Despite their different focal points—digital disruption, administrative inertia, fiscal unsustainability, ideological orthodoxy—their message is the same: higher ed is in crisis, and incremental reform will not be enough.
Levine and Van Pelt compare the present moment to the Industrial Revolution. Colleges and universities, they argue, are facing a “Great Upheaval” as digital learning, shifting student demographics, and changing employer demands render the traditional model obsolete. Rosenberg critiques the sector’s paralysis—elite schools tinker around the edges while regional and small private colleges hemorrhage relevance, students, and money.
Vedder is more direct: Many of these institutions shouldn’t be saved. Their value proposition—skyrocketing tuition in exchange for middling outcomes—is no longer viable. And Shapiro’s Lawless frames the decay as not just financial or operational, but legal and cultural: colleges and universities have abandoned the principles of due process, viewpoint diversity, and open inquiry, and have instead become leftist echo chambers increasingly at odds with their civic mission.
Each author targets the economic dysfunctions plaguing the higher education sector. Tuition has soared even as the return on investment for many degrees has plummeted. Administrative bloat and lavish capital spending on non-academic amenities have widened the disconnect between costs and outcomes. Meanwhile, online platforms and nontraditional providers are undercutting traditional colleges and universities with more flexible, affordable, and often more relevant credentials.
[RELATED: Some of These Institutions Need to Die. But They Won’t.]
The old model—where students pay top dollar for a four-year residential experience with a loose connection to career readiness—is no longer sustainable. Yet too many institutions continue to act as though nothing has changed.
Beyond the balance sheet, the cultural and ideological drift within higher education is accelerating the crisis of legitimacy. Shapiro’s case is the starkest: he argues that many colleges and universities have traded intellectual pluralism for conformity and political advocacy, selectively applying rules and punishing dissent. Vedder and Rosenberg share this concern, warning that the campus culture wars are not only stifling free expression but also eroding public trust.
Students and parents are noticing. Fewer believe that college is the only path to a meaningful career—or a meaningful life. Many now see higher education as overpriced, hyper-politicized, and increasingly out of touch with the world young people are preparing to enter.
There is little hope among these authors that the system can fix itself from within because of the bubble in which the key players—administrators and faculty—live. Vedder calls for creative destruction: let the unsustainable colleges and universities go under. Rosenberg urges bolder leadership willing to challenge sacred cows. Levine and Van Pelt envision a more stratified, dynamic system in which elite colleges and universities coexist with specialized institutions and fast, job-focused providers. Shapiro calls for legal reforms to enforce fairness and restore the core academic values of free inquiry and open debate.
The common thread? Disruption is inevitable. The only question is whether higher ed will evolve by design—or implode by default.
It may seem harsh, even callous, to suggest that some colleges and universities should be allowed to shutter. But not every institution deserves to be rescued. We don’t preserve outdated businesses just for nostalgia’s sake, and we shouldn’t do so for outdated education models either. The goal isn’t to burn it all down—it’s to clear the way for better, more accountable, more relevant forms of higher learning.
If the leaders of American higher education won’t change course, perhaps the market and a growing number of skeptical parents and students will do it for them. In the meantime, the Trump administration is aggressively pursuing tighter oversight of funding and restrictions on international student visas—moves that will likely accelerate the reckoning for underperforming colleges and universities already struggling to justify their existence.
Image: “Harvard College” Jacob Rus by Wikimedia Commons
” Shapiro’s case is the starkest: he argues that many colleges and universities have traded intellectual pluralism for conformity and political advocacy, selectively applying rules and punishing dissent.”
All true. Even more important is the fact that they have abandoned the pursuit (and transmission) of truth and knowledge as their telos.
Good piece.
I initially misread this as “not every college *major* deserves to be saved.”
That is absolutely true both in terms of some majors in general, and then some otherwise legitimate majors at specific IHEs. Economics at UMass Amherst comes to mind — it once did (and I believe still does) host the annual worldwide conference on Economic Marxism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is the only place that could…
Colleges increasing seem to promote emotional responses from many of their students, at least the vocal/social media portion. Hardly conducive to becoming educated in the true definition. They do offer “magic parchments” but employers are growing skeptical of that magic.
“Education, properly a drawing forth, implies not so much the communication of knowledge as the discipline of the intellect, the establishment of the principles, and the regulation of the heart. Instruction is that part of education which furnishes the mind with knowledge.” [1913 Webster]
In 1923, Scribner’s Magazine ran a number of essays on higher education. One, by Percy Marks, a professor run out of Dartmouth after the publication of his revealing ‘The Plastic Age’ (1924), exposing campus life to the degree to inspire the 1925 movie of the same name starring It Girl, Clara Bow.
“The idea is, of course, that men are successful because they have gone to college. No idea was ever more absurd. No man is successful because he has managed to pass a certain number of courses and has received a sheepskin which tells the world in Latin, that neither the world nor the graduate can read, that he has successfully completed the work required. If the man is successful, it is because he has the qualities for success in him; the college “education” has merely, speaking in terms’ of horticulture, forced those qualities and given him certain intellectual tools with which to work—tools which he could have got without going to college, but not nearly so quickly. So far as anything practical is concerned, a college is simply an intellectual hothouse. For four years the mind of the undergraduate is put “under glass,” and a very warm and constant sunshine is poured down upon it. The result is, of course, that his mind blooms earlier than it would in the much cooler intellectual atmosphere of the business world.
“A man learns more about business in the first six months after his graduation than he does in his whole four years of college. But—and here is the “practical” result of his college work—he learns far more in those six months than if he had not gone to college. He has been trained to learn, and that, to all intents and purposes, is all the training he has received. To say that he has been trained to think is to say essentially that he has been trained to learn, but remember that it is impossible to teach a man to think. The power to think must be inherently his. All that the teacher can do is help him learn to order his thoughts—such as they are.”
Marks, Percy, “Under Glass”, Scribner’s Magazine Vol 73, 1923
Colleges today are at real risk of losing those who would be successful regardless as it is quite easy to get exposed to knowledge, ideas and disciplined thinkers online these days.
“Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.”
Ezra Pound
“Percy Marks, a professor run out of Dartmouth after the publication of his revealing ‘The Plastic Age’ (1924), exposing campus life to the degree to inspire the 1925 movie of the same name starring It Girl, Clara Bow. “
The young man Marks depicted would have been a member of the class of 1928. He would have graduated in the Spring of 1928, started white collar job that Fall, and have married his now-calmed-down young lady in the summer of 1929.
And we all know what happened a few months later in 1929…
In the Fall of 1928, the young man would have been replaced by another young man in the Class of 1932. While I didn’t have the occasion to pull the 1932 Brown yearbook, as part of my Masters research, I pulled the 1932 yearbook of Amherst College — somewhat of a peer institution. And what I noticed, in addition to the pictures and blurbs about the graduating seniors, was a list of the names and addresses of “those students who had to withdraw due to the current economic condition.”
Both the country and the state of higher education was very different in 1938 than it had been in 1928, and what I observe of undergraduates today makes me think that we are in another Gilded Age, one likely to soon and suddenly end.
Another quote that I am trying to remember correctly is what a depression-era hobo said to a Federal investigator: “I may not look like much, but if you give me a bath, a night in a warm room, I’ll look like a graduate of the University of Chicago — which is what I am.”
Liberals end up destroying everything they get their hands into and our colleges and universities are no exception. Conformity is the enemy of freedom both in speech and in learning. Liberals insist on one thing, conformity. You can see it in their politicians (how man Democrats vote different from leadership?) They will shame anyone who doesn’t conform and attack people they don’t agree with. Just look at how they treated Elon Musk! Do you believe they treat conservatives on college campuses any better?
Being an out-of-the-closet conservative on campus is far worse than you can even imagine.