Reform Higher Education via the Market
Get what you pay for, not what they want to give you
President Trump wrote on TruthSocial April 15:
“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’
“Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”
This came only days after his administration docked the world’s by far richest university with its $53 billion endowment by $2.2 billion of US government (i.e. taxpayer) funds.
Harvard’s President Alan Garber had already put the university’s foot down in a letter, stating:
"No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue."
Well, if the government is paying, it would seem to have at least a partial right, but let’s leave that aside for a larger problem.
Our colleges and universities—with ultra-woke Harvard as a leading factor—appear to have flipped the switch on higher education.
The original intention was, or should have been, for students to learn to think. It now appears for the most part they exist to tell those same students what to think.
It has almost become a given that college today consists of a self-chosen elite class of professors and administrators (recently augmented beyond comprehension by DEI) inculcating their ideologies into a generation of witting or unwitting students.
This has evolved for some time into a self-replicating system that begins in kindergarten and continues through graduate school. In order to get a job or succeed at almost any stage of our educational system you have to think “correctly.” Many students have reported lying in agreement with their teachers in order to get decent grades.
Meanwhile, K-12 results in the USA compared to the rest of the developed world have been nothing short of catastrophic, even worse because we pay more per student than almost every other country.
The very Harvard now offers remedial math (not calculus, but geometry and algebra you’re supposed to learn in high school) for incoming freshmen. What is this but DEI gone berserk?
As promised during his campaign, President Trump has set about dismantling this pattern on the federal level, diminishing or destroying the Department of Education. Brave parents and community groups are working at K-12 in their own districts. Some gains have been made.
But what do you do about college when the vast majority of schools still suffer from this pervasive ideological uniformity?
Despite presidential efforts, the same professors and administrators with those same views are still there in almost every college and university, promulgating the same identical ideas with the same identical biases. Diversity of thought, the real diversity, remains hard to find.
What can parents and students do to fight back against this indoctrination that undermines their education, not to mention wastes large amounts of their money?
Use the market!
It tends to work everywhere else.
People are often afraid to use it in education, afraid of their elite “masters,” but higher education is a perfect place for it to function.
Yes, it can be done, not just by choosing schools that are more even-handed, but more importantly by choosing the less biased courses in all schools.
Places like Hillsdale and the University of Austin are to be praised, but they are small. Most young Americans go to exponentially larger public state colleges and universities within their states for obvious financial and practical reasons. They significantly outnumber those attending private institutions like Harvard. (Harvard has roughly 7000 undergraduates, University of Tennessee at Knoxville 30,000.)
It is in these larger schools that we may more easily see the market function. If everyone enrolls in English 103 instead of English 104, sooner or later English 104 will not be offered.
Schools are businesses at bottom, fighting to survive. The number of our colleges is already diminishing.
Admittedly this method will not be perfect. School administrations will invent ways of preserving systems they rely on for their power, even as simply as renaming them, but markets tend to prevail eventually.
Further, using the market for the choice of school and for the choice of courses within the school is a way for students and their families to have real agency to solve a problem that dominates our culture—something they do not have now, especially at higher levels, and are forced to rely on government. It is a way for the citizens to have an impact on our colleges.
The Inoculator, which we have just launched, is a very early, beta attempt to harness the power of the market to reform higher education and encourage that diversity of thought. We welcome you to try it and to give us feedback.
There are two points this article brings to mind.
1. After applying to a homeschooled, online education program, I was selected for an interview. A series of questions consisted in the final stage.
“What will you do to be sure diversity is your top priority?”, was the question I answered for them to say, “Thank you. But we will be considering other candidates”.
My reply was nothing more than “Diversity is not a priority, but true understanding of the subject was THE priority”
2. After running for BOE in my county, I will be unable to do so again. The vile attacks on myself, my family and those who displayed my signs were dangerous with no accountability held on those offenders.
Universities have become hedge funds with campuses attached. Not only should federal funds be withheld from offending institutions, but foreign sourced endowments need to be tightly regulated and restricted.