The U.S. has led the world in higher education but our "university system is beginning to molder," writes Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg.
Prices continue to rise: A year at Cornell now costs nearly $90,000. Administrative bloat is rampant: Yale University now has the equivalent of one administrator for every undergraduate student. Federal student debt has reached $1.6 trillion, 60% more than credit card debt.
"A majority of Americans now consider a college degree a questionable investment," writes Wooldridge, and enrollment keeps falling.
Higher ed resembles the U.S. car industry in the '70s "hampered by a giant bureaucracy, contemptuous of many of its workers, and congenitally inward-looking," he writes.
George Will sees declining enrollment as a healthy sign: People who are unlikely to benefit from higher education are finding other paths to adulthood.
He blames the decline of humanities majors on the woke:
Why study history when it is presented as a prolonged indictment — ax-grinding about the past’s failure to be as progressive as today’s professors? Who wants a literature major that is mostly about abstruse literary theories — “deconstruction,” etc.?
There's a wide political split on higher education, Will writes: "Almost three-quarters of Democrats think colleges have a positive impact on the nation; 37 percent of Republicans do."