'Elitists, crybabies and junky degrees': Educators see growing disdain for universities
Palm trees line a pedestrian path at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz. The state has cut spending to all public higher education drastically over the past decade. (Bonnie Jo Mount / Washington Post)By Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan
Washington PostNovember 25, 2017 | Cochise, Arizona
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"Why does a kid go to a major university these days?" said Antenori, 51, a former Green Beret who served in the Arizona state legislature. "A lot of Republicans would say they go there to get brainwashed and learn how to become activists and basically go out in the world and cause trouble."
Antenori is part of an increasingly vocal campaign to transform higher education in America. Though U.S. universities are envied around the world, he and other conservatives want to reduce the flow of government cash to what they see as elitist, politically correct institutions that often fail to provide practical skills for the job market.
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To the alarm of many educators, nearly every state has cut funding to public colleges and universities since the 2008 financial crisis. Adjusted for inflation, states spent $5.7 billion less on public higher education last year than in 2008, even though they were educating more than 800,000 additional students, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
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Source: Pew Research Center (Kevin Uhrmacher / The Washington Post)[...]
"The new upper class has nothing to do with money. It has to do with where you were educated," said Arizona State University President Michael Crow, who is pushing to make quality degrees more accessible to lower-income students.
Antenori views former President Barack Obama, a Harvard-educated lawyer who taught at the University of Chicago Law School, as the embodiment of the liberal establishment. Antenori said liberal elites with fancy degrees who have been running Washington for so long have forgotten those who think differently.
"If you don't do everything that their definition of society is, you're somehow a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal cave man," Antenori said.
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Crow is working with 11 other public university presidents to bring more low-income students to campus and increase graduation rates.
He said there is an indisputable return on investment for a college degree. College graduates earn more, pay more taxes and are less likely to need government assistance, he said.
"A lot is at stake," he said. "Education is the single most important predictor of social mobility for the last hundred years; it drives the economy."
But, he said, "There is fear and angst about the future. People are looking around and saying to universities, 'What are you doing for me? You guys at the universities are building robots that are going to replace my job.' "
Jobs that require only a high school diploma are disappearing fast, he said: "The old way where a guy like my dad or my grandparents - really smart people, but not educated - could do almost anything is just not going to work anymore."
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