Higher-Education Crackup: “Colleges are hotbeds of racism and rape that everyone should be able to attend.”

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, has a sharp
USA Today column about the declining popularity of
college. Snippets:

Even fancy schools such as Harvard and Dartmouth have
seen applications
decline, with Dartmouth’s dropping 14% last year, a truly
staggering number.

It’s no picnic for public institutions either. “There have been
21 downgrades of public colleges and universities this year but no
upgrades,” reported Inside
Higher Ed. It’s gotten so bad that schools are
even closing their
gender studies centers, a once-sacrosanct kind of spending.

The decline in enrollment seems
to be slowing, but the long-term problem remains: With costs
growing, and post-graduation incomes stagnant or worse, students
(and parents) are growing more reluctant to take on the extensive
debt that is required to attend many private, and some public,
institutions.

That is only made worse by the decline in higher education’s
image, damage that is mostly self-inflicted. As Twitter wag
IowaHawk japes:
“If I understand college administrators correctly, colleges are
hotbeds of racism and rape that everyone should be able to
attend.”…

From the economics to the politics, colleges and universities
are looking less like serious places to improve one’s mind and
one’s prospects, and more like expensive islands of frivolity and,
sometimes, viciousness. And that is likely to have
consequences.

Industries with bad reputations face declining markets and more
regulation. At this rate, that’s where higher education is headed.
It’s not clear at all that its leaders appreciate the depth of the
problem.

Read the whole thing.

Reynolds teaches law at University of
Tennessee, so he understands the problem from within the asylum’s
walls.

The April 2013 issue of Reason featured
a symposium with Reynolds, me, and many others discussing
“Where Higher Education Went Wrong” and how it might get its groove
back. My two cents:

You should be going to college to have your mind blown by new
ideas (read: whole fields of knowledge that you didn’t know existed
until you got to college), to discover your intellectual passions,
and to figure out what sorts of experiences you might want to
pursue over the next 70 or so years….

None of [even the best colleges] will survive the notion that
they exist mostly to serve 18- to 21-year-olds kids who need
high-paying jobs rather than limn the outer edges of intellectual
possibilities.

Read the whole symposium.