The Outlaw Campus: Ten Steps to Reform
Posted: January 7, 2014 Filed under: Education, Think Tank | Tags: Colleges and Universities, Education, Middle Ages, Professor, Professors in the United States, Tenure, United States, Victor Davis Hanson 2 CommentsThe university has become a rogue institution in need of root-and-branch reform
Not now. Colleges have gone rogue and become virtual outlaw institutions. Graduates owe an aggregate of $1 trillion in student debt, borrowed at interest rates far above home-mortgage rates — all on the principle that universities could charge as much as they liked, given that students could borrow as much as they needed in federally guaranteed loans.
Few graduates have the ability to pay back the principal; they are simply paying the compounded interest. More importantly, a college degree is not any more a sure pathway to a good job, nor does it guarantee that its holder is better educated than those without it. If the best sinecure in America is a tenured full professorship, the worst fate may be that of a recent graduate in anthropology with a $100,000 loan. That the two are co-dependent is a national scandal.