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@ ZeroHedge News (RSS Feed)
2025-05-06 21:40:00
The College-For-All Fallacy
The College-For-All Fallacy
https://realclearwire.com/articles/2025/05/01/the_college-for-all_fallacy_1107699.html
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For years, would-be higher-education reformers have warned that America’s higher education crisis—soaring tuition, crippling student debt, and weak learning—was rooted in https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomlindsay/2015/08/29/higher-educations-faulty-economics-how-we-got-here/
: every high school graduate should go to college.
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/this%20picture%20rocks.JPG?itok=TRp42wz1
In 2025, the proof is glaring. https://news.gallup.com/poll/648905/americans-confidence-higher-education-continues-decline.aspx
in colleges has crashed to 36%, down from 57% in 2015. The college-for-all dream, though well-intentioned, has inflated costs, buried millions in debt, and watered down education. Built on sand, its reputation is collapsing before us.
But you wouldn’t know any of this from many media accounts, according to which, as in this breathless headline, “https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/04/16/trumps-demands-harvard-escalate-his-war-higher-ed
.”
His war on higher ed? Not quite.
In fact, when it comes to higher-education reform, President Donald Trump is as much mirror as mover. Over the past two decades, it has been not simply a single president but the American people who have grown increasingly dissatisfied with higher education. And for good reason.
For some time, college was considered America’s golden key. In 2013, https://www.gallup.com/poll/163268/college-education-seen-important.aspx
extolled college as a smart bet.
However, since the ‘80s, https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-higher-education-funding-cuts-have-pushed-costs-to-students
to 48%. Republicans dropped from 56% to 39% in support; Democrats fell from 68% to 62%.
By 2019, faith was fading. https://news.gallup.com/poll/264824/college-education-less-important-young-adults.aspx
of students graduated within six years, leaving dropouts with loans to repay but no degrees to obtain the jobs with which to repay them.
And the 2020s are crushing the dream. https://news.gallup.com/poll/648905/americans-confidence-higher-education-continues-decline.aspx
surged 16% (2020–2023).
Adding academic insult to financial injury, too many universities have abandoned the quest for wisdom, focusing instead on political activism. This decline into partisanship has served, unsurprisingly, only to heighten https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/08/19/the-growing-partisan-divide-in-views-of-higher-education/
poll revealed that even non-degree holders favor practical programs like two-year (associate’s) degrees.
The college-for-all myth has come at a steep price: spiked demand, ballooning tuition, and student debt—all while academic standards (and with them, student learning) sank. https://nsse.indiana.edu/
data reporting that only 40% of seniors gained reasoning skills.
What does this brief history of the last two decades of American higher education tell us?
Rather than being the result of a president throwing his weight around, the college-for-all myth has collapsed under its own weight, driving up tuition, burying students in debt, and eroding academic rigor, while failing to deliver promised opportunity.
Higher education’s chief critic is not the Commander-in-Chief, but rather the majority of Americans whose views he voices. With only 36% of Americans expressing confidence in higher education, colleges must look inside and then reform themselves, or risk further irrelevance.
And they must do so now, before they shatter the aspirations of yet another generation.
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Tue, 05/06/2025 - 17:40
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/college-all-fallacy