SOURCE:
THE FEDERALISTURL:
http://thefederalist.com/2018/02/28/enrollment-data-public-opinion-suggest-college-bubble-popping/by Greg Jones
All good things, goes the old cliché, must come to an end. And for American higher education, the end is nigh. It will be a particularly sad finale as, before their descent into madness, America’s college campuses were a premier source of national pride.
Even today, people from all corners of the globe dream of sending their children to one of the many leading education centers within America’s borders. Despite comprising less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States boasts more than half of the globe’s top 100 universities.
These institutions have advanced research critical to some of the biggest scientific accomplishments in modern history, from a fundamental understanding of chemical reactions to the Internet. But now a lethal combination of radical liberalism, a rapidly evolving economy, and unstoppable technological progress is all but certain to fell America’s ivory tower.
Groupthink Has Strangled the Academy’s MindAlready the areas of scholarship that once defined a broad, well-versed college education, the liberal arts and humanities, are being passed over for more practical and profitable majors. These long-left-leaning departments have left in their wakes a legacy of groupthink that infects nearly every nook and cranny of academia. Liberal faculty at American colleges and universities outnumber their conservative counterparts nearly 12 to one.
The resultant ideological monopoly has created an environment concerned more with indoctrination than actual education and produced legions of impressionable, emboldened students intent on wreaking havoc, by violence if necessary, on institutions that refuse to cater to their increasingly insane demands.
America’s college campuses have served as epicenters of radicalism before, but this isn’t the 1960s, and the concepts of peace and love no longer enjoy their once-vaulted status in the far-left’s philosophical hierarchy. Today’s student activists aren’t asking for equal rights, but superior rights. Rather than defend the free speech their baby-boomer forebears sought, they seek to demonize it.
Incidents at schools such as the University of Missouri and Evergreen College, whose enabling of snowflake culture made national headlines, have convinced prospective students and their parents that the lunatics have indeed taken over the asylums. The predictable bad PR, along with other factors such as the rising cost of tuition and a declining birth rate, have begun to hit higher ed where it hurts most: enrollment.
Student Enrollment and Confidence DropsStudent bodies are in decline across the country, and somewhat drastically. The spring of 2017 hosted 2.4 million fewer students nationwide than did the fall of 2011, or an approximately 12 percent decrease in six years. Continued reductions in enrollment will hit the smallest, and by extension most vulnerable, colleges the hardest. But there is little even the nation’s largest colleges and universities can do at this point, as public perception of a degree’s value has created a cost/benefit crisis that, given plausible future trends, may be impossible to reverse.
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