During my second career teaching high school English, I noticed several darkly funny but disturbing trends in “higher” education. They were fueled by three primary drivers: abandoning merit, the federal government taking over the student loan industry, and DEI hysteria.
It was Barack Obama who federalized the student loan industry, pushing the idea that everyone should go to college.
To make that idea a reality, it was necessary for the government to guarantee student loans.
That had plenty of unfortunate and foreseeable effects. Because Colleges no longer had any financial skin in the game, they went on a mad administrator-hiring binge, which required enormous amounts of money, which required unprecedented numbers of students.
Combined with a faux-religious devotion to DEI, colleges admitted all manner of people who in past years would have reasonably been found to be poorly suited to do college-level work. To cover this, it was necessary to do away with any sort of predictive testing like the SAT. All that was required for college admission was a student loan, unless one was a white male applying at an Ivy League school. Those guys, regardless of academic qualification, were often denied.
Enormous DEI departments with all manner of administrators and functionaries were established, and hundreds of millions were wasted on DEI gurus imported to inspire them.
So unprepared were so many, colleges were forced to establish remedial high schools on campus. It was a great scam. Full tuition for no credit, and blame students’ lack of ability on high school teachers like me, who could have told them who wasn’t academically capable if anyone had bothered to ask.
Grade inflation was a direct result of these disasters. It was necessary to hide the scams, so professors were required not only to dumb down the content of their classes and to require far less work, but to award unearned grades. An entire generation of college students was conditioned to expect maximum grades for minimum and poor work. And God help any professor who gave a minority student the grade their lack of work deserved.
As a result, innumerable students took 6-7 years to get a 4-year degree at enormous cost, but many simply dropped out without a degree, bearing enormous debt they had no credentials or ability to pay off.
I’m certainly not arguing college should be denied to anyone. I’ve known many people who struggled greatly but managed to earn a degree and were better and more productive people for it. I am arguing for rational decision-making and fiscally sound, ethical colleges.
Hellbound and Down 