Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That? (nytimes.com)
In Canada and Japan, public-university tuition is now about $5,000 a year. In Italy, Spain and Israel, it’s about $2,000. In France, Denmark and Germany, it’s essentially zero. A few decades ago, the same thing was true in the United States; government funding covered much of the cost of public college. Now students and their families bear much of the burden, and that fact has changed what used to be a pretty straightforward calculation about the economic value of college into a complex math problem.
This is certainly part of the problem. Costs have skyrocketed, and I honestly don’t know how some families approach this, other than to say “You’re going to have loans. Get used to it.” For my family, I didn’t want this path. And we’ve made decisions to avoid this path for my kids. I want them to graduate with no student debt. Period.
Even that, though, is a type of privilege. Because I can make that happen. Lots and lots of people can’t.
But I also think there’s a deeper cultural issue. I think the war on being considered smart is a real one. It’s always been there, but historically, it’s been under the surface. The rise of the Tea Party, and then Donald Trump, has brought it to the forefront. These days, being smart is looked at, and classified as, being woke. And boy is that the lightning rod de jour.
I actually hadn’t read the entire article when I wrote the paragraph above, and now that I have, I feel validated:
When pollsters ask Republicans to expand on why they’ve turned against college, the answer generally has to do with ideology. In a Pew survey published in 2019, 79 percent of Republicans said a major problem in higher education was professors’ bringing their political and social views into the classroom. Only 17 percent of Democrats agreed. In a 2017 Gallup poll, the No. 1 reason Republicans gave for their declining faith in higher ed was that colleges had become “too liberal/political.”
Wonder what happened around 2016-2017 to exacerbate this?
Among college faculty, the ratio is even more pronounced, and it has been growing more unbalanced over time, shifting from a 2-to-1 left-right ratio in the mid-1990s to a roughly 5-to-1 ratio in the early 2010s.
It’s almost as if being educated leads to perspectives changing, views changing. And maybe, just maybe, leads to having to think about issues, rather than blindly follow an ideology (or authoritarian). It’s not a surprise that the ”right” is seemingly at war with education (looking to you, Florida).
This leftward shift on American campuses corresponded with a realignment in the American electorate. In 2012, a majority of voters with a bachelor’s degree (and no further credential) chose Mitt Romney for president over Barack Obama; in fact, B.A. holders were the only educational cohort Romney won. Obama made up for his losses among college grads by winning a majority of voters with only a high school diploma. Four years later, the education skew flipped: Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton among noncollege graduates, but he won only 36 percent of voters with college or graduate degrees.
I don’t think I’m wrong here.
