https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/08/18/britains-failing-universities-must-be-allowed-to-go-bust/
Roger Bootle:
The current crisis in higher education derives from the earlier over-expansion of the sector, linked to the pretence that a degree certificate automatically improves both the life chances of its holder and the productivity of the economy, regardless of academic standards and of what knowledge or skills are acquired on the course.
Some of the most serious defects of our higher education regime derive from the decision in 1992 to merge the former polytechnics with the university sector. Many of the old polytechnics did a very good job, concentrating on practical subjects and practical skills. Since then, there has been a proliferation of poor quality degrees in subjects that are neither truly academic nor technical.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/07/23/universities-played-cruel-trick-students-deserve-to-go-bust/
SAM ASHWORTH-HAYES:
Let’s start with the students. The expansion of higher education was supposed to herald a new age of prosperity for Britain, giving us a workforce fit for the new “knowledge economy”. Announcing his target for 50pc of young people going to higher education in 1999, Tony Blair mocked “the forces of conservatism, the elite” that had “held us back for too long”, insisting that “there is no such thing as too clever”.
There is, however, such a thing as “not clever enough”. Massively expanding the share of the population going to university appears to have coincided with a marked lowering of standards. Part of the problem is likely to have been a matter of simple mechanics: a system with more students passing through it is almost by definition one which is less selective. And if you decide to let the less academically able in, you will have to find a way to accommodate them.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/a-new-problem-with-four-year-degrees-the-surge-in-college-closures-7f68c4aa
Universities have buckled under the strain of tuition losses as the number of college-bound students continues to decline
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-universities-have-done-to-themselves-antisemitism-hearing-dei-woke-history-abf4901b
Peggy Noonan:
Regular people used to imagine what a university looks like—rows of gleaming books, learned professors, an air of honest inquiry. That isn’t now a picture the public can see. Now it’s something else, less impressive, less moving. Less important to our continuance as a people.
The elites who run our elite colleges are killing their own status. They are also lowering the esteem in which college graduates are held. Your primary job as a student is taking in. You read, learn, connect this event with that, apply your imagination, empathize, judge. It is a spacious act—it takes time to absorb, reflect, feel—which is why you’re given four whole years to do it. But if the public senses that few are studying like independent scholars in there, not enough are absorbing the expertise of their field, that they’ve merely been instructed to internalize a particular worldview and parrot it back . . .
Well, if that’s the case, who needs them? Is it even worth having them around in the office? The people of a country have a greater stake in all this than universities and their students understand. And the elite schools are lowering their own standing more than they know.
Why university presidents are under fire
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/08/opinions/israel-palestine-antisemitism-american-universities-zakaria/index.html
Fareed Zakharia:
American universities have been neglecting excellence in order to pursue a variety of agendas — many of them clustered around diversity and inclusion. It started with the best of intentions. Colleges wanted to make sure young people of all backgrounds had access to higher education and felt comfortable on campus. But those good intentions have morphed into a dogmatic ideology and turned these universities into places where the pervasive goals are political and social engineering, not academic merit.
As the evidence produced for the recent Supreme Court case on affirmative action showed, universities have systematically downplayed the merit-based criteria for admissions in favor of racial quotas. Some universities’ response to this ruling seems to be that they will go further down this path, eliminating the requirement for any standardized test like the SAT. That move would allow them to take students with little reference to objective criteria. (Those who will suffer most will be bright students from poor backgrounds, who normally use tests like the SAT to demonstrate their qualifications.)
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/590971-will-the-us-higher-education-bubble-finally-burst/