Can Our Universities Be Saved?

….we might do well to try and answer the question, no? Now this isn’t all of the story, but it strikes me that you’ve got a general societal change—things normal today were unthinkable a century ago—and you’ve also got historical realities like Carnegie’s large grants to universities on the condition that they abandon their ecclesiastical and theological roots. Closer to today, the main payer of bills for both public and private schools is…federal, state, and local government.

Are we surprised, then, that schools funded by government are largely staffed by people who believe that the expansion of that government is a good thing, even when it means the government is providing “goods” that Adam Smith would have described as “not public goods”?

And there we have a central part of the problem, as well as a central part of the solution. For a starting point, something like 45% of incoming freshmen don’t graduate in six years, and of the bottom third, only 17% graduate. Of those receiving Pell grants, I believe only 40% graduate.

In other words, there are huge cuts that can be made to government funding of postsecondary education without reducing the supply of college graduates, simply because there are a lot of students who have no realistic chance of getting a degree. In turn, we might find that professors who suddenly need to seek employment in the private sector might learn a few things that contradict their former socialism and materialism.

Agree or disagree with me on this, you’ve got to know the problem to solve it.

Good thoughts Bert. We also could do with a government that refused to fund universities that reject the Constitution, and Christians who give money to these places as if they were doing God’s work.