Can We Save Our Universities?

The assault on liberal arts, declining enrollment, and an atrophying academic purpose leads American higher education in question.

There is, in my opinion, no better city in the U.S. than Boston. It manages to feel almost as dense as New York while remaining remarkably clean and orderly. The T is typically clean and quiet, and in my experience, on time¹ . Boston is the largest college town in America, and you can feel it. There permeates in every cafe, library, and study spot a sentiment that this is where ambitious young people come to catapult themselves into a meaningful life. One of my core beliefs is that in this aura of creativity and genuine learning, young people shape themselves into something that they otherwise could not. The breadth of experiences in a large city is fundamentally incomparable with the safety and sterility of most other universities.

This difference in experience versus sterility is the thesis of what I believe is the destruction of most of America’s higher education facilities. Like every other aspect of our lives, higher education has become a business. Private or public, there are two paths, as I see it, that these universities are choosing to go down: an investment into academics to yield financial returns from successful alumni, or an investment into sports programs, business schools, and a ludicrous annual tuition².

The former is the path that the Ivy League has chosen for almost two centuries, and part of what made them so successful. These schools operate as an educational venture capital fund, expecting a majority of investments to yield minimal results while knowing that a fraction of a fraction will end up making all the rest worth it. Take Charles Johnson, who graduated Yale in 1954 and paid roughly $2400 over his four years to attend and would later donate a staggering $250 million dollars to the school in 2013. That’s a return on investment of roughly 114,000 times for Yale, an investment so large that it singlehandedly validates this academic mission statement. Schools like Yale have an institutional advantage compared to their “lesser” counterparts: they’ve been doing this for literal centuries. Generation after generation of donors and grants have allowed the Ivy League to become the home for our nation’s greatest thinkers and wealthiest children.

It’s naive to write these institutions off as simply a playground for our richest, though. I was fortunate enough to peek behind the curtain at Harvard’s private library and classrooms, and it’s immediately noticeable that these students are extraordinary in every sense of the word. Are there students that don’t “deserve” to be there but get in because of their wealthy families? I’m sure. But denigrating the whole of what is statistically and empirically a nest of innovation and intelligence as simply born lucky is plainly false. Instead of attacking these institutions, why not observe what makes their academic environment so superior? Ignorance to the reality of a situation is a short-term solution that many public universities (and more accurately state governments) have taken to avoid a fundamental truth: we are failing the next generation.

To many, Yale and Harvard are “snobby” and for “coastal elites.” They have a privileged student population who got in because their dad donated a sum of money larger than I know exists. Their teachers aren’t gifted thinkers and educators but smug tenured professionals disinterested in the plight of our critical issues. The more we saw the best and brightest flocking to these institutions, the more we plugged our ears and closed our eyes. You can see this in the news right now, the gleeful delight of many Americans that institutions like Columbia and Harvard were inundated with protesters and activists. Rather than looking deeply, and even admirably³ , that these students felt compelled to act against injustice, we look at them as performative naive students who have never seen what “real life” is. In a society slowly dying of spiritual and moral atrophy, it makes perfect sense that any individual who still wants to better our world is scorned and ridiculed. For what is easier, pointing and laughing at a nineteen-year-old or considering why in fact we feel nothing about the violence and horrors of our world?

I believe what makes these “elite”⁴ schools is their ability to not only offer but encourage a pursuit of a liberal arts degree. I feel passionately that the decline of the liberal arts degree is the most damaging factor for the future and success of what makes the United States the standard for ingenuity and innovation. A liberal arts degree is an experience in real critical thinking and problem solving, where the rubric does not decide your potential but rather your ability to overcome the inevitable broken paragraph and stifling writer’s block. It’s hard. Primary education in the U.S. tries to lay some baseline for this critical thinking but the gaps are too wide and cracks too deep to truly prepare our youth for a life of surprises and challenges.

Believing a degree in English or history is useless is a common opinion for most, but if you were to call accounting or engineering useless in the same sentence you would certainly raise a few eyebrows. Even in writing that previous sentence I felt a feeling in my stomach telling me “that isn’t the same.” We have conditioned our youth to prioritize completely imagined earnings over actual passion and inherent talent. The job market for C.S. majors, for example, has completely imploded precisely because tens of thousands of young adults have been advised to choose the “safe and high earning” path over taking the time to find their genuine passion and therefore a drive to become supremely talented at their field. If you studied computer science out of a belief that you will live a financially comfortable life only to find a lifeless post-grad job market, you would likely give up. You have no passion in coding, so what good is it to overcome this seemingly major obstacle? It makes more sense to find a job that will pay you and blot and ignore the part of you that wants genuine meaning.

As I wrote at the beginning of this piece, your time in university is crucially important. The ages of 18-21 are a rapid acceleration into adulthood with the guardrails coming down faster than you can realize. Many consider this acceleration and typical decay of wonder and passion as the shedding of childhood naïveté. Instead, I would argue, this decay is because we have blinded ourselves to what really matters to the real us. This conditioning has transformed from a vague cultural critique into a real and physical reality of our world. Universities are increasingly investing into what will yield students a higher salary, a better internship, and, as mentioned previously, a higher chance of future investment into the schools entertainment products. This investment is cyclical and only empowers more confused eighteen-year-olds into careers that drain them of their tremendous personality and creativity. At the University of Kansas, for example, money continues to pour into the behemoth business school and engineering department. New buildings, expansive internship opportunities, and a sea of seminars and career advice is powering what has become a new normal: undecided students choosing the practical over the possibility.

At Harvard, 55% of students are studying in a traditionally non-professional field, like history or philosophy. At KU, that number is 43%. That isn’t an accident, nor is it a function of financial hardship from the undergraduate population. The average familial income of a student attending Harvard is $168,000 whereas at KU, that number is $125,500⁵ . You cannot blame the system and absolve yourself of a societal responsibility to encourage critical thinking. It is our job to instill in our youth and in our society a respect for non-traditional majors. It is our job to invest equally and without bias to all departments, because no education is more valuable than another. And it is our job to make every university a real environment of learning and debate rather than an automatic checkpoint of life.

College should be earned. The rise in undergraduate classes at state schools across the country is not a function of anything more than the desire to grow endowments. Working to make economic mobility accessible without degrading the academic integrity of our institutions should be core to the next decade of higher education. The reality is that a plurality of students are not viewing college as an exciting opportunity to expand their minds but rather the only way to ensure they do not live in poverty. That is, of course, wrong. The proliferation of certifications in high-skill jobs should be welcomed and accelerated. A student who has no interest in pursuing and expanding their mind non-professionally should be able to enter the workforce and earn a respectable wage without trudging through the aspects of a liberal arts education that they simply will not care about. These people are not dumb, nor are they any less human than someone pursuing a more theoretical degree. It is in fact a respect for these professionally minded individuals that they should be able to have this agency.

Our refusal to give these individuals their own agency is what is rapidly degrading the quality and rigor of our higher education system. Ask any professor or visit any classroom and you will unfortunately see just how ingrained this thoughtless cheating has become. It’s simply too easy to cheat now. Fighting this typhoon of tools designed to escape any brain activity is a fruitless affair and merits a strategic shift in our aims and ambitions of what success means. If students are going to cheat, and they are, then we need to strategically retreat and simply cut bait on the students who are disinterested in the purpose of university. Develop fast-tracks into the job market that prioritize the skills these students will need to succeed, while omitting them from the need to attain a “holistic” education. If these students still fail to not use this slop in their entrance to the job market, then they simply are not prepared for the real world and should not be in a university environment.

The coming enrollment bomb spurred by a lack of children being born during the recession, and simultaneous declining need for a bachelor’s degree, is what will begin the next phase of a commercialized college. Skyrocketing tuitions are first, but not nearly last in the destruction of non-professional degrees and universities role in society writ large. The next step, which many universities are already pursuing, is prioritizing their profitable sports programs above any particular academic pursuit. The University of Kansas is spending a billion dollars to rebuild their football stadium, primarily because the school experienced a sudden surge in performance in 2022 and 2023. When KU first announced the project, there was to be a shopping district fit with a plethora of amenities to furnish an economic boon to Lawrence. Slowly but surely this ambitious project was shrunk in size, but not in budget. Now the University is siphoning millions from the city of Lawrence and her taxpayers without anything to show for it. To make matters worse, the football program has returned to its dilapidated state and will struggle to fill seats when the stadium opens next year.

This is a microcosm of a larger environment where university leadership cannot see the long-term picture. If completing a certification program costs 20% of a normal tuition and accomplishes the same employment needs, these universities will have to attract a different type of student. This type of student, however, is not looking for a college that has gutted every department that does not have an immediate professional application. So what then? Layoffs, budget cuts, and shrinking. KU is not the only university to furnish certain profitable departments with lavish libraries and their athletic departments with gigantic stadiums. Across the country, university leadership is pressured by what wealthy donors remain to put money into their entertainment products. For every Charles Johnson donating to Yale’s medical school, there are ten Southern millionaires who want to see Texas A&M win a national championship. This just simply is not sustainable.

I want to make it clear this article is not a slight towards the wonderful work of our university faculty nor towards a student who is simply not interested in liberal arts. The professors at any state school are just as bright as their counterparts at Harvard, and vice versa. A student who wants to study accounting or mechanical engineering should be celebrated just as much as a student who chooses a less traditionally applicable degree. Therein lies my point. There is a clear preference in our society and universities for one side over the other. Balancing the scales and not just permitting but encouraging a foray into the more theoretical can only stand to be a boon for the U.S. and the world. The hubs of culture and innovation like Boston and New York are so special because they precisely encourage artists, poets, investment bankers, and executives to all share the same subway car, the same public parks, and the same city. Division and segregation of any persons dreams, but especially that of a young person, is horribly cruel.

This line between constructive analysis and pretentiousness is a hard one to walk, and I earnestly hope this has come off as the former. Still, I reject the idea that because we may come off as judgmental, we should simply not say anything at all. When liberal arts is nearing destruction and our society is more and more subscribing to the workplace with a religious fervor, it is only right to speak an uncomfortable truth. Asking, truly asking, ourselves if our career path is right for us is so tantamount to living a meaningful life that the conversation can almost end there. If you truly find meaning in the business world, then that is fantastic. Turbulent self-reflection is unpleasant and something I continue to undergo, but at the end of this long introspective road is the full richness and beauty of life. When you find what you are meant to do, nothing else compares.

1. Although I will be the first to admit that I had few time constraints and may have simply ignored the occasional delay.

2. Although this particular strategy is being used regardless of academic merit.

3. In some cases. Obviously violence and destruction of property is not acceptable for any university.

4. I reject the idea that earning potential is what makes an institution valuable or not.

5. In a state with a considerably lower cost of living and tuition for in-state residents.