College Cost Reduction Act Doesn’t Threaten the Humanities

Originally Published by the Washington Examiner

American higher education has gotten a bad rap lately.

To be fair, much of it is deserved. Far from marketplaces of ideas, universities are hostile to dissenting viewpoints. Faculty openly discriminate against their colleagues on political grounds. Universities’ reputations have taken back-to-back-to-back hits from replication, antisemitism, and plagiarism crises. Academic hoaxes have exposed entire fields of study as preposterous.

Perhaps the worst indictment: American higher education has failed to adequately support economic mobility. Controlling for inflation, college attendance costs have tripled over the last 60 years. Meanwhile, 30% to 37% of bachelor’s degrees produce zero or negative net returns on students’ educational investments. As a result, fewer young people report interest in attending college.

Yet, for all its many failures, higher education remains vital to the nation’s economic and national security. The people need these institutions to shape up and fly straight.

They need them to be great again.

Read the full article here.