Colonial colleges were founded to provide learned ministers, learned laymen, and higher education for its own sake. Two hundred years later, in 1837, the first female college, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, was founded to provide an education for women equal to that of the men-only Ivy League colleges.
Today, these elite colleges have drifted from their original purpose and become bastions of far-left ideology.
In 2014, Mount Holyoke caved to the atheistic woke agenda with the admission of transgender students. Recently, Mount Holyoke made headlines again. Annabella Rockwell, the heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune, entered college as a traditional, self-described “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” freshman, only to graduate as a miserable, anti-male social justice warrior with an alcohol problem. Her brainwashing was so severe that her mother paid $300 a day to a cultist deprogrammer.
The College Fix analyzed a number of universities and their humanities departments. More than 50% of the departments surveyed had no Republican professors. Except for New York, six of the seven states analyzed are primarily Republican with Democratic professors outnumbering Republican professors by 11 to 1. Even in Republican states, the university faculties are far left.
The old guard of classically liberal professors is retiring and is being replaced by rising young scholars who teach Marxist Critical Race Theory.
Our nation cannot survive even one more generation indoctrinated in the deadly force of totalitarianism. Thankfully, however, these fanatical institutions may be engineering their own demise.
Colleges and universities have vastly overreached in their campus life and programs of study, and now they are paying the ultimate price. There has been a steady decline in total enrollment – 14% since spring 2011, despite the fact that the U.S. population is increasing by 2 million a year. Since 2019, undergraduate enrollment nationwide has fallen by 8%.
The number of men enrolled fell more than 18%, nearly double that of females. With gender studies and professors droning on about “toxic masculinity” and “white male privilege,” why would men want to waste their time in college?
Costs are soaring with tuition that rises above inflation, manipulation of blanket federal student loan guarantees, administrative bloat, and high salaries. Many students are turning to zoom courses where they can get their degrees online for a fraction of the cost.
Nearly 40% of students never graduate or complete a certificate, yet rack up mountains of debt. More than 43 million people in the U.S. hold a total of $1.6 trillion in student loan debt.
There has been a decline in enrollment in majors such as the humanities, history, and English. Both starting salaries and lifetime income in these areas are low compared with other areas of study.
Employers are shifting their attitudes about the value of a college degree. Only 40% reported in an employer survey that recent college graduates are well-prepared to handle tasks requiring good communication skills while 60% believed recent graduates are unprepared to be effective employees.
Universities are quietly dropping test score requirements for guaranteed admission. Students demand pass/fail courses and even abolishing grades while others demand that everyone receives an “A” grade.
Because research shows that American workers are now the least well-educated among industrial nations, skeptical American employers will likely administer their own hiring tests rather than depend upon a college degree as proof of employment readiness.
At one time in our nation’s history, jobs did not have degree requirements. Degree inflation began with the Great Recession in 2008. So many were applying for jobs that employers used the college degree requirement to screen applicants. The result was that, between 2008 and 2017, 74% of new jobs were in occupations that required a bachelor’s degree while only about 40% of the adult workforce had a college degree.
Now we are in a tight labor market with more jobs available than applicants, and many employers are changing their hiring requirements.
A number of companies, such as Google, IBM, Apple, and Hilton, are moving away from requiring college degrees and focusing more on skills and experience.
The state of Maryland has eliminated college degree requirements for many state jobs, which has led to an explosion in hiring. Delta no longer is requiring a college degree for its pilots, although it is preferred. Walmart, America’s largest private employer, has announced that it is shifting hiring requirements from a college degree to skills job applicants have.
A four-year college degree holder earns more over a lifetime than someone without a degree. However, workers can also gain skills needed for many jobs without a four-year degree. Many are opting for a trade career where they can get certified in a matter of months at a fraction of the cost of college. They end up with no debt and are ready for work at a much earlier age. Others are going directly from high school into the job market.
As employers shift from the requirement of a college degree, enrollment in woke universities will continue to drop. Elite schools will lose their veneer of prestige and experience degree deflation as the public rejects these overpriced indoctrination centers that lack academic rigor.
Yet there is one segment of colleges that is not losing enrollment. A small but influential network of faith-based, Western tradition colleges – including the University of Dallas, Thomas Aquinas, Benedictine, and Hillsdale – is seeing record-breaking enrollment. They are discovering their programs have become more relevant, not less so, to a younger generation who, weary of far-left propaganda and chasing the latest educational fads, is drawn to schools that emphasize tradition and faith.
It seems that America is beginning a return to its religious roots.
via wnd
