By Sidney SecularThe corrupted and denatured universities are losing their near universal monopoly on knowledge attainment, knowledge storage, and specialized training for high salary professions. Besides, they just cost too much, so they’re on their way out, but they don’t want to admit it yet.
The position of the universities is somewhat analogous to that of the monasteries in Medieval Europe which were all-powerful as knowledge repositories, book producers, and the home of proto-science, and operated in a kind of bubble–a world of their own. The combination of the Reformation, competition from the printing press, the nascent universities, and political maneuvering against the Catholic Church led to their dissolution in the early 16th Century. Now its time for the university bubble to burst, as well.
With the degradation and the near disappearance of the true “liberal arts”, which had provided the thrust for free inquiry and the discipline of philosophy which were at heart the search for “truth”, or even “The Truth”, the universities fell into the “everything is relative” syndrome, automatically destroying the idea of universal truth. Thus, universities faltered and fell for the allure of political correctness via the sabotaging influences of Cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt School’s “Critical Theory”(criticizing tradition and established ideas for no good reason except to undermine society), and the infiltration of the culture distorters and destroyers, and so became the incubator for all the Left-wing and Communist craziness that is overtaking society.
The Left blindly demands that more “minority” applicants and those who don’t perform as well on supposedly culturally biased school entrance exams be allowed into the “elite” universities, or even charter high schools. Thus, as this happens, “elite people” will begin sending their children to institutions of lesser repute, and the Ivy League schools and their ilk will cease to be regarded as “elite” as they are dumbed down to the least common denominator in accordance with equalitarian dogma.
Educators and analysts continue insisting that those of lower academic capability enter “higher education” in order to “earn more money”. They overlook that this simply results in the dumbing down of higher education. The Bachelor’s Degree is losing its value as employers lose faith in what it represents.
The proportion of university-age students attending universities has risen from 13% in Britain in 1991 to 50% today, with similar results elsewhere, meaning that the requirements for the Bachelor Degree are being diluted to graduate dummies, making the degree nowhere near the gold standard it once was.
Already, employers are setting up their own systems of assessment, sometimes giving the job to a non-graduates. They are bypassing degrees and reverting to de facto apprenticeships where they establish their own entry requirements and train people on the job. Surveys have found that employers regard young college grads as deficient in such key workplace skills as written and oral communications, critical thinking, and analytical reasoning–the very things that college was supposed to teach them.
Universities, especially for non-STEM students, are turning into very expensive day care centers. Young people are maturing more slowly, living more sheltered lives. The “I-Generation”(those born in the mid to late 1990s), the ones after the Millennials, is less likely to ever have done any work and less likely to drive than the Millennials were at the same age. Thus, the university for them is not a rite of passage, but merely an extension of “home”.
Hence, we see the genesis of the “snowflake” phenomenon. As immature individuals, the students want to feel intellectually “safe”, protected from ideas that upset them, and to enjoy the right not to be “offended”. The faculty increasingly agrees; and even if they don’t, they censor their teaching accordingly to avoid bad student reports and having their contracts terminated.
The obvious fact is that many high school students would be better off learning a skilled trade where there are many opportunities available than saddling themselves with huge student debt by obtaining a degree from a mediocre university leading to questionable employment prospects.
It would be frivolous to obtain a liberal arts degree but for the fact many benighted employers still require a college degree. However, more and more companies that used to require a degree for certain administrative jobs no longer require one.
Already, the massive expansion in the number of universities that began in the 1960s is now contracting. Smaller colleges are simply closing their doors, unable to fill the spaces and thus unable to stay afloat. Experts predict 25% of colleges will “fail” over the next two decades.
Since it is readily apparent to everyone that the Left acts stridently to restrict free speech on campus and prevents prominent conservatives from giving speeches and commencement addresses to the student body, the public concludes that the academics are biased, that their research is not to be trusted, and that they should not be funded by taxpayer money or be permitted charity status. In 2006, 41% of Americans had a lot of confidence in higher education, but by 2017, that was down to 14%.
“Academic mobbing”–in which fanatical leftist “lackacademics” destroy colleagues whose research challenges leftist dogmas–further undermines public confidence in academia.
It’s obvious that universities can be regarded as the ideological enemies of conservative governments. Hopefully, such governments can soon overcome their cowardice and obliviousness to all of this extreme Marxism and simply abolish universities’ tax breaks and partial public funding, and so let them sink or swim on their own.
Then there’s the technology-driven competition the increasingly woke and expensive universities must face. They are rapidly becoming redundant as it becomes easier to educate oneself on any subject.
There is a “freelance fringe” of academics who hang around university towns and perform tutoring of students in addition to other work, such as journalism, who have become increasingly prominent and available as a result of publicity on the internet and social media. Students are also turning to quasi-academics, often YouTube personalities, who become their de facto teachers.
Due to this competition, the teaching of non-STEM subjects will contract, and the availability of some STEM programs are also likely to contract. Once a significant number of key people, often those who are more intelligent or perceptive, start to lose confidence in the system, then their lack of confidence will become contagious, especially among those turned off by the extreme Marxism of much of the educational establishment.
Of course, the incredible stratospheric level of fees required to obtain a college education that result in terribly burdensome loans will ensure that the college bubble will burst, and the Left will be left to lose one of its key weapons and advantages in the promotion of the downfall of the West.”
© 2021 Sid Secular – All Rights Reserved
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