The American people are largely dissatisfied with our colleges and universities. Parents and students are frustrated by the high cost of tuition. Graduates complain that the baccalaureate degree doesn’t open the doors that it used to. Many people – long aware of the ideological excesses of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences – watched in horror as DEI, critical race theory, and cancel culture bled over into STEM fields that were previously thought to be immune to ideology.
Faculty members are equally dissatisfied. Classes are increasingly staffed by adjunct labor – people with no official academic ranking who the university pays only a fraction of what a tenured or tenure-track professor is paid. And even faculty who do enjoy the status of tenure are increasingly frustrated by top-down management from an ever-expanding class of staff and highly-paid university “administrators” who prioritize the financial health of the institution above all else. In short, no one is happy with the academic status quo.
Since the week after my eighteenth birthday, I’ve been studying, living, or working on one campus or another – so I’ve had almost three decades to observe higher education from inside. And our universities are a mess. The dysfunction isn’t new. But the Great Awokening that began sometime in Barack Obama’s second term rapidly accelerated it. The diktats of “accessibility,” “inclusion,” “diversity,” and more have undermined the mission of our universities. Admission standards have declined, and many high school graduates and their families lost confidence in the value of higher education.
Standards for academic performance have eroded significantly – but the lost years of Covid-19 and the advent of online schooling have ensured that many newly-admitted students simply don’t have the skills to meet even the lowered standards. The lowered standards for success have ensured that employers can no longer count on the college degree as an indicator of competence and basic skills. Remarkably few graduates procure employment that demands the knowledge and abilities they learned in their major area of study. The value of a baccalaureate degree has never been lower.
A major driver of the decline is that too many Americans are going to college. Why are there too many students? In large part, it’s because there are also too many colleges and universities. The fact is that universities are supposed to be a place for advanced study that demands excellence from the people they admit. Higher education should be a place to train leaders for a complex, advanced society. It shouldn’t be a place to credential future bank clerks, real estate agents, and retail workers – roles that many graduates now occupy. If our system of higher education cannot train leaders to maintain our nation and culture, then it has no reason to exist.
There are two fundamental realities that maintain the status quo in higher education. These realities must be disrupted if any meaningful reform is to occur. The first is the student loan industry. Under Barack Obama, Congress enacted a bill (ostensibly meant to shore up the Affordable Care Act) that made the federal government (rather than banks) the originator for all student loans. This triggered radical changes in student admissions and tuition structure that incentivized predatory practices by universities while inhibiting their ability to perform their proper social function. Virtually any student who could secure an admission letter from any accredited school was guaranteed loans or grants if they can document financial need. Not surprisingly, this encourages money-hungry universities to admit students who are unprepared for college. Tens of thousands of those students never graduate, but still bear debt burden from a college stint that they never should have been allowed to attempt. This further hinders the prospects for financial stability among a group of people who already come from disadvantaged backgrounds. And those same universities have the audacity to preach to their students about systemic injustice in America.
The second reality that inhibits change is the accreditation system. Universities must win accreditation if they are to be eligible to receive federal student loans. This ensures that accreditors have immense power in shaping university structure and offerings. Accreditors are also indirectly responsible for the left-wing ideology that pervades the universities. When institutions are up for reaccreditation, the accreditors look at the school’s mission statement and assess whether they are successfully pursuing it. This is a primary measure of accreditation. In practice, this allows universities to pursue whatever goals they want: if DEI is their top priority, then can add that language to the mission statement. That “forces their hand” to implement DEI policies across the institution and curricula. If the accreditors find that they are successfully doing so – in accord with their stated mission – then they receive re-accreditation. This makes the school eligible for federal student loans, which then creates the perversion of incentives described above.
What can be done to fix our system of higher education? While many commentators seem to think that even greater accessibility is the cure, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Our institutions need to be less accessible. If excellence and subject mastery is the goal, then they must become less inclusive – indeed, a university should be exclusive. College is not for everyone, and our educational policy should force schools to recognize that truth.
What follows is a plan for doing so. If these recommendations were adopted, there is no question that the entire system of higher education would be put into upheaval. There would be far fewer students attending. Many institutions would close. But these proposals would allow for colleges and universities to return to the critical functions that they are meant to play – both for students and for our society writ large.
Step 1: Congress and President Trump must get the government out of the student loan business. Further, they must direct banks to disregard the judgments of accreditation agencies in their lending decisions. This would weaken the power of the accrediting bodies and ensure that financial aid is available for training that doesn’t look like the traditional 4-year course of college study. It would also encourage some institutions to forego the accrediting charade entirely, which may ultimately eliminate some accrediting bodies.
Step 2: Invest heavily in trades education and alternative credentialing. This will create attractive options for high-school graduates that aren’t the 4-year college degree. A high proportion of college freshmen don’t even want to pursue a bachelor’s degree. They have been bullied into attending because parents, teachers, principals, the media, and every other adult they know has told them that they must go to college if they will have any chance at a happy life and financial stability. The funding to support alternatives to college can be a part of the same bill that returns student lending to the banks: the money currently used to provide student loans can be redirected to innovative education and schools that prioritize trades, vocational work, and new credentials with narrow, direct application to the workforce.
Step 3: Create a national college entrance exam. The existence of alternatives to college may not deter enough students from attending. Further, the banks could also extend loans to underprepared college applicants, continuing the predation created by guaranteed federal loans. Thus, America should require a general competence exam that all students take in their junior year. This should not be the SAT. Rather, it should require that students demonstrate a basic competence in every area of study required to obtain a 4-year degree (literature, grammar, composition, math, science, foreign languages, history and philosophy). As an added benefit, this would force a major reformulation of high school curricula, which are currently a mess.
Step 4: Make the entrance exam matter. Require a score in the top 33% to be guaranteed government-subsidized student loans (where the government pays the interest during the course of study). Simply receiving college admission letter would no longer guarantee loan eligibility. Students who scored in the bottom 64% of exam-takers may apply to college, but student loans are not guaranteed – decisions on whether to issue those students loans will be at the banks’ discretion and will not be subsidized by the government.
Step 5: Disqualify undergraduate applicants over the age of 50 from receiving subsidized student loans. The gratuitous “overage checks,” which many students receive to finance their living expenses during their course of study are often abused as a form of public assistance. In many cases, people in their 60s and 70s begin college study in order to temporarily pad their income through student loan overage checks. Many have no intention of completing the degree – and some, nearing the end of their lives, have no intention of repaying the loans.
Step 6: Disallow admission of illegal immigrants at institutions eligible for subsidized student loans. This can be done at the federal level. Still, some states (including Texas) allow illegal immigrants to attend college and independently loan money. This should urgently be addressed by state-level legislation.
Step 7: Punish institutions who resist reforms. There are many ways to force compliance, but an obvious measure would be to craft the reform legislation to include taxation or seizure of university endowments as penalties for defiance.
If implemented, these changes would create a seismic shift in American education. As more students pursue options other than the traditional college route, competition among universities for the college-bound high school graduates will become even more ruthless. This will force changes in university curricula as schools have to compete more directly with vocational and trades-based institutions. Tuition costs will likely be forced down as a result. Far fewer young Americans would be burdened with long-term debt. The federal government would probably save money. The national entrance exam would incentivize serious study among ambitious high-school students – and the limited loan availability for poor performance on the exam would ensure that most of the students who don’t really want to go to college won’t attend.
Together, all of this would help reduce the classist stigma that endures against those who don’t pursue university study – an unfortunate side effect of the Obama-era canard that everyone should go to college. Best of all though, making higher education more exclusive and less accessible will allow the universities to reclaim their role as guardians of intellectual excellence. With only well-prepared, motivated students in attendance, academic standards can be restored, grade inflation will deflate, and the value of university credentials will be restored.
Unquestionably, this would create a painful disruption of the existing order – but most of that pain would be born by the universities themselves. It would annihilate the current system of academic labor: far fewer professors would be needed with fewer students, which would wean institutions off the exploitative practice of depending on adjunct faculty. Many universities would be forced to close entirely. Some of these campuses could be purchased by state governments and used to expand alternate forms of education and credentialing.
Regardless of the disruption, we need universities that can prepare leaders to maintain our society and revitalize American excellence and competitiveness in the world. We owe it to our citizens to fix higher education.
Adam Ellwanger is a professor at University of Houston – Downtown where he teaches rhetoric and writing. He is a Higher Education Fellow at The Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform and a 2023 Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute for Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. Follow him at @1HereticalTruth on X.
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