Americans have finally woken up to the great university scandal
Colleges and other higher education institutions are churning out embittered, over-educated failures, indoctrinated in Left-wing ideology
Americans are disillusioned with higher education. In only 15 years, from 2010 to 2025, the share of respondents to Gallup polls who say that a university education today is “very important” has plummeted from 75 per cent to 35 per cent.
Growing scepticism about the benefits of a college or university education is warranted. Between 1990 and 2022, the share of Americans aged over 25 with college diplomas nearly doubled, rising from 21 per cent to 38 per cent.
While college or university graduates still earn more than those without degrees, the graduate surplus has produced underemployment for many degree holders, defined as employment in jobs that do not require a college education. According to a 2024 report by the Burning Glass Institute and the Strada Institute for the Future of Work, 52 per cent of college graduates in Generation Z were working in jobs that did not require a college diploma and 75 per cent of that group remained in the trap for a decade after their graduation ceremony.
It comes as no surprise that underemployment is high among workers with degrees in liberal arts (56.5 per cent) and anthropology (55.9 per cent) and low among those with degrees in nursing (9.7 per cent) and computer science (16.5 per cent).
Far from warning students of the difficulty of finding jobs with particular degrees, however, universities are glad to take their money while dooming them to failure and bitterness in the future.
The oversupply of college graduates has enabled employers to demand degrees for jobs that did not need them in the past. For example, the proportion of secretaries with college degrees nearly quadrupled between 1990 and 2021, from 9 per cent to 33 per cent. In 2017, a Harvard Business School study showed that, even though only 16 per cent of production supervisors had college degrees, 67 per cent of job postings for new hires required one.
Many employers are apparently using a college degree as a filter in whittling down the applicant pool. The degree itself may be irrelevant to the job, but it demonstrates that the graduate can complete tasks and show up on time. But given the expenditure of years and money necessary to obtain it, it is a very expensive certificate of punctuality.
In light of the diminishing gains from higher education, the question that needs to be asked is this: should universities in their present form continue to exist at all?
Today’s bloated “multiversity” is a grotesque conglomerate, an institutional black hole that has absorbed ever more previously-independent institutions over the last century and a half.
In the 19th century, Harvard Law School was forced to lower its entrance requirements, in order to compete with alternatives like independent law schools and apprenticeships with attorneys. In the 1900s, 48 per cent of lawyers and doctors still attended independent professional schools. By the mid-20th century, the university blob had not only absorbed law and medicine into its swelling protoplasm but had also devoured formerly-independent artistic training institutions, like ateliers and musical conservatories.
Meanwhile, the increasingly-professionalised natural sciences moved onto campus. Following the collapse of ambitious 19th-century attempts to create a unifying science of society, like those of Comte, Marx, and Bentham, specialised fragmentary “social science” disciplines like economics, political science, and psychology were welcomed by the expanding university empire – even though nobody can really explain how sociology differs from anthropology, or why, in American universities, political philosophy is in the political science department, not the philosophy department.
After the Second World War, so-called “creative writing” programmes sprang up at universities, producing those sad and ludicrous figures, professor-novelists and professor-poets, whose work nobody reads. Then, in the 1970s, former Sixties radicals won the right to their own Left-wing Agitprop programmes on campus – black studies, Hispanic studies, women’s studies, gender studies. Via the human resources departments at big employers and the “diversity training” they supervised, otherwise-unemployable graduates of campus identity-politics programmes disseminated woke concepts and phrases like “LatinX” and “birthing person” to captive audiences of workers and managers.
The need to coordinate all of these unrelated schools and departments has been used as an excuse by empire-building university leaders for a massive expansion of centralised university administration. Premodern liberal arts colleges were run on shoestring budgets by the faculty themselves. But even medium and small colleges today are Kafkaesque bureaucracies.
Unified from above by ever-thickening layers of meddling bureaucrats, universities have been unified from within by political and ideological conformity. While the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the US has remained roughly the same over the last generation, Republicans have become nearly extinct in the professoriate. At Yale, where I obtained a master’s degree and worked as a teaching assistant in the 1980s, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among the faculty was recently estimated to be 28 to 1. A 2024 survey of 37 departments across seven universities found that 72 per cent of faculty members were Democrats and only 6.7 per cent Republicans.
College graduates may leave campus with few skills that are useful in their future jobs, but they will have been indoctrinated for years in progressive ideology by almost-exclusively Democratic professors and administrators. Ironically, the Democratic Party itself is the greatest victim of the glut of woke college grads. In 2020, for the first time, white Democrats with college degrees outnumbered those without, turning the party into a strange-bedfellow coalition of college-educated whites and mostly-non-college-educated non-white Americans.
The result was the Biden administration, which tilted so far to the Left that it alienated enough minority voters as well as working-class white voters to give Republicans control of all three branches in 2024.
Notwithstanding the progressive virtue-signalling of university faculty and administrators, the American university as an employer engages in Dickensian employment practices as bad as those of the sleaziest low-wage meat-packing or chicken-plucking firm. While American universities are richer than ever – Harvard has been called a hedge fund with a university attached – many are slashing labour costs by phasing out tenured professors in favour of poorly-paid adjuncts with very little job security. Today half of American undergraduates are taught by adjuncts, who make up 70 per cent of university faculty.
Meanwhile, universities are milking cash cows in the form of academic programmes that lead to visas and citizenship for foreign students, who can then bring in their relatives. The university can charge full tuition to the rich parents of foreign students; in return, whole clans can become eligible for chain migration through family unification, once the student has obtained citizenship. The losers are the voters whose representatives shower universities with tax privileges on the promise that they will educate the country’s own citizens, not rich foreign ruling classes.
Because selfish, money-hungry, empire-building universities will not reform themselves from within, government will have to reform them from without. In the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed by Congress recently, Section 84001 requires that federal aid be cut for degree programmes in which most graduates earn less than a median high-school graduate.
Politicians of both parties are interested in apprenticeships and other alternatives to a four-year undergraduate education. Employers, too, can play their part by dropping degree requirements for jobs that do not need them. But much more radical steps need to be taken. Universities need to be broken up.
Natural science and engineering faculties should be spun off as independent research institutes with their own educational and apprenticeship programmes. So should trade schools. It should be possible to graduate from high school and go directly to law or medical school, without wasting four years obtaining a bachelor’s degree.
According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, most jobs in the US require only a high school diploma and perhaps some on-the-job training. For most people, apprenticeships or skill certificate programmes should replace the quest for useless college degrees.
Literature and the arts flourished for millennia, thanks to commercial sales or aristocratic patronage, and can flourish again, once university “creative writing” programmes are defunded and shut down and “writers in residence” on campus are compelled to reside somewhere else. Left-wing race and gender radicals can plot the overthrow of capitalism and the patriarchy in cafes and bohemian neighbourhoods, as in the old days.
Empirical, non-partisan studies of the economy and politics are valuable. But mathematical neoclassical economics is a pseudoscience like sociology and anthropology. Bogus social science disciplines that are only a few generations old deserve to go the way of alchemy and astrology.
The scandal of higher education can no longer be ignored. College graduates in the US and in some other countries are underemployed and overeducated. The next generation can benefit from reforms that minimise the link between college credentials and jobs. And society as a whole can benefit by liberating resources and talent that are trapped inside the sclerotic and overgrown higher education sector.
