I started sounding the alarm years ago: Through soaring tuition and leftist orthodoxy, higher-ed institutions would lose the support of a broad swath of the American people. At some point, parents rebel against paying small fortunes to have their kids indoctrinated to reject their values. As the latest Gallup poll shows, a steadily declining percentage of Americans express confidence in higher education.
Predictably, the decline over the past decade has been sharpest among Republicans, whose values are most reviled in academia. The decline among Democrats, who are far more likely to feel a philosophical kinship with campus progressives, has been modest. (See the Gallup numbers.)
I would love to see the same question asked about Virginia’s system of higher education as a whole, and for individual institutions, too. I would conjecture that resentment is strongest against “elite” institutions where progressivism is the strongest.
Obviously, there are many progressives in the general population, so some people are just fine with what’s happening on college campuses. But if you alienate half your potential market, you’re in big trouble. — JAB
We might ask how many of the uber-liberal students of today are being funded in full by their parents? Scholarships and student loans seem to be in full play here, with a possible reverse correlation between personal funds invested by parents and degree of destructive liberalism evinced by related students. If not, then it seems likely parents who are directly funding very expensive educations at these universities have no idea what their children are being taught.
UVA is not worth the In-State cost. Out-of-State gets to pay extra for the indoctrination!
The academic catalog is full of areas of study with no worth. They don’t teach you HOW to think. Pretty much all of them have a point of view that is not dispassionate.
Meanwhile, UVA waters down academic merit to get in, and then devotes great resources to keeping in the marginally qualified or unqualified. I also wonder how the scholarship funds are distributed. I bet you could find racial bias there, not just the leaning towards lower income. Of course, the Alumni Association explicitly awards scholarships to black only applicants (Ridley scholarships).UVA knowingly was violating the law and will continue to do so, hiding behind Landscape to sort, and eliminating SAT scores which pretty definitively point to the tilting of the tables to favor their favored victims. Merit be damned (except in sports, unless you are Emma Weyant who “lost” to a 6’4″ “woman” with male parts still attached).
Get back to education. Drop Common App (which is also committed to DEI – go to the website). Require SATs. No mention of race. But that will be gamed by what clubs you join and the essays. UVA will continue to cheat until forced to stop (and the underlings will still cheat to the extent they aren’t watched). There is a reason the Honor System is dead…
So true! So fantastically written.
“At some point, parents rebel against paying small fortunes to have their kids indoctrinated to reject their values.”
It’s a wonder that these progressive institutions have any applicants from conservative families.
From the DeSantis Chief of Staff:
“It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”
Institutional decline across current American society and culture has one common controlling denominator, leftist “progressives.”