There have always been plenty of good reasons to send your children to college, but do those reasons still hold up today? Many colleges and universities are now heavily corrupted by radical politics, and it’s surely time to revisit those reasons. Is college still the best use of four years of your children’s lives, and a cash outlay in excess of a hundred thousand dollars?
The foremost reason for college was always that graduates would have learned to become independent thinkers, self-starting problem solvers who knew how to analyze complex issues and come up with solutions. Still true today? No, because the political radicals who now control so many college classrooms don’t value independent thought and analysis. It’s quite the reverse: They want students to swallow whole a radical left political ideology, and not question it. If students were to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of different political ideas, as professors used to ask them to do, they might come to the wrong conclusion. In the old academy, intellectual curiosity was prized, but in the debased academy of today, it is squelched. Studies of recent graduates find their reasoning skills consistently far below what they should be. On this score, at least, there’s no longer any reason to go to college.
An equally obvious reason to go to college: much enhanced career prospects—more satisfying jobs, better-paying jobs. Still true? Probably, if you get training for a specific profession. Lawyers, doctors and engineers can still prosper. But if we just look at what being “college educated” does for career prospects, the answer for most will be that college is no longer a good investment of time and money. Many programs costing students in excess of $100,000 to complete, find them still earning less than $20,000 two years later. Forty percent of graduates have jobs that don’t require a college degree. Absent a link to a specific professional pathway, there’s no compelling reason for college on this score either.
Another attraction of higher education was that colleges were the storehouses of all the knowledge and wisdom inherited from the greatest of the thinkers, scientists and writers who went before us. Students would be immersed in this great legacy of our brilliant predecessors, the people who shaped the modern world. Is this reason still valid? No, you can scratch this one too. The radicals who control academia don’t want their students to learn from those outstanding minds. Why? Well, they are arrogant enough to believe that their ideas are better than anything inherited from the past, because those dead white males were bigots and racists in their view. If students were to read Shakespeare, David Hume, or Adam Smith, they’d quickly see that the pathetic radical zealots who teach them can’t hold a candle to those great minds. Accordingly, radical professors make sure to keep their students well clear of them.
We used to think that a college education made better citizens, and therefore a better society for all. College educated people were better informed about our unique form of government and its rationale, as well as better informed about our country’s history. Not only does this reason no longer hold, the exact opposite is true. Many recent graduates are a threat to our Constitution and particularly to our First Amendment freedoms. A large proportion of them think it’s just fine to shut down people who offend them, and they are the main instigators of the cancel culture. That’s not entirely surprising. Colleges don’t now teach the U.S. Constitution, and mostly don’t require courses in the nation’s history. The few history courses still taught often do more harm than good, because they are taught by people who despise our society and want to remake it in the image of the desperately unhappy states run along Marxist lines.
A last argument for a college diploma was life satisfaction. A college education would enhance students’ enjoyment of life by introducing them to the glories of our civilization: its brilliant artists, poets, dramatists, composers. That’s gone too. Campus radicals dismiss all of this as the product of our racist and sexist past, which must not distract us from the serious business of tearing down and remaking society.
So what do you get out of sending your kids to college now? There is one serious pitfall that many have discovered to their great regret. If your children believe what those radical zealots preach, you might well end up estranged from them, because you’ll be seen as the means by which the evil values of the past are transmitted to the next generation. The radicals want to “liberate” your children from your corrupting influence! And even if that doesn’t happen, the non-stop diet of juvenile radicalism fed to students can still stunt their minds and their outlook.
Be that as it may, you will in any case have made a very handsome financial contribution to the upkeep of the far left radical regime that has taken control of academia. How else could such foolish and malevolent people live so well? When you mortgaged your house to pay your children’s tuition, did you really intend to make a six-figure campaign contribution to Marxist ideals? Personally, I limit my political donations to three figures—six seems to me absurdly extravagant—and, in any case, I make sure my money goes go the political viewpoint I support, not one that I find stupid and destructive.
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