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Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Douglas Andrews: Is the Collegiate Death Spiral Coming Soon?

Our nation's colleges and universities are long overdue for a fiscal reckoning.

For those of us on the Right, it’s about time. Our colleges and universities have for years grown unchecked by free-market principles, fully enabled by a corrupt deal between spiraling tuition costs and endless government subsidies. And all this while serving as leftist indoctrination camps for our children.

It’s a noxious bubble that can’t burst soon enough.

“Colleges and universities were already facing mounting financial pressure,” writescolumnist, scholar, and university professor Steven Hayward, “because enrollment is steadily declining and certain to get much worse in the coming decade (the result of falling birthrates back at the time of the housing crash in 2008-09). Add to this the financial hit they are taking right now because of the virus, on top of the huge loss this year of foreign students who typically pay full tuition rates and subsidize other students, and a large number of colleges and universities face a serious risk of insolvency.”

Add to these pressures the reduction in enrollment of foreign students (they pay top dollar for an American college education), the cancellation of this year’s fall sports season (football, with its ticket sales, lucrative TV contracts, and licensing deals, is the meal ticket for nearly every other university sport), and the decision by many students to put off college at least temporarily, but perhaps permanently, and we can see why even Stanford has found it necessary to cut 11 of its sports programs altogether.

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7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Shut down the colleges, learn a trade, and be a contributor to society

Anonymous said...

We will not run out of people with liberal arts degrees anytime soon.

Anonymous said...

Liberal arts degree, what a joke.

Anonymous said...

we need to start being brutally honest- both Salisbury University and UMES are worthless. If UMES wasnt a historically black university, it would have been closed years ago. Salisbury is, at best, a totally average and unexceptional university.

The problem is universality. It used to be that only the best and brightest went to university. It used to be that the PhD was extremely rare. When only a few went to college, a college degree actually MEANT something. Now, everybody knows that college is just a continuation of high school, that most of the kids are only there to get their accreditation (and will do the least amount of work to get it).

How elitist! But, at the same time, high school graduates used to know things. They used to be taught literature and fine arts and latin. Go find a person who graduated high school in the 1950s- ask them what and how much they know.

Making everyone go to college means that college has been dumbed-down, just like everything else. America does NOT have a political problem- we have an IQ problem.

Anonymous said...

If you care about our kids EDUCATION. This will be the only way to save the education system.

Anonymous said...

You're right. But simple useless degrees like this is part of the problem. I put my kid through 4 year's if Penn State. She has a liberal Art's degree. Now I have to pay for an 18 month nursing program at Villanova. These college's our so corrupt. She and her friends HATE President Trump. This is what they learned at PENN STATE. I had to give her actual FACTS to combat the misinfomation she had learned. It's unbelievable what these college's charge for Indoctrinating kid's.

Anonymous said...

I sure hope so! They been screwing students for years, $500 books, and ripoff class fees!