When It Comes to Preparing Our Kids for Careers, One Size Does Not Fit All

Time is running out for my teen-aged son.

He’s over halfway through his junior year in high school; we’re on a bullet train speeding toward graduation day — and the brakes aren’t working. He’s an Asperger’s kid, so the rigors of traditional schooling have been challenging. Every day he gets through school is a small win.

A bigger win for my son and countless other students would’ve been the school system preparing him for a post-high school life that doesn’t include a traditional four-year college. He’s plenty smart and a bright future awaits him in whatever field his amazing, complicated mind decides is the right one. The only problem is, his public school hasn’t helped him unlock his future.

And he’s not alone. This generation, as a whole, has been failed by our country’s school system and the “one size fits all” mindset. College is seen as inevitable.

What our kids need is post-secondary school options — innovative, outside-the-box and plentiful options.

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently challenged the “one size fits all” mentality head-on in an address to the Committee for Economic Development of the Conference Board’s (CED) Fall Policy Conference, stating, “It is imperative that schools begin to think differently about how they are preparing for students in high school to be prepared for a variety of options.”

She continued, “There should be many education pathways because there are many types of students with many different interests, many types of opportunities with varying requirements.”

She’s exactly right, and it’s gratifying to know someone in Washington, D.C. gets it. She’s made plenty of enemies, however, with her forward-thinking approach. Congressional Democrats resent her efforts to roll back Obama-era regulations that unfairly target private, for-profit and non-profit colleges and universities – schools that are training students to meet the ever-increasing need for a skilled workforce.

Take, for instance, Keiser University, a private university in Florida. It is way ahead of the curve by offering its students a robust online education environment in which to gain the important skills and hands-on experience necessary to thrive in today’s workforce. Keiser gets high marks for its learning environment and is one of the top graduates of nursing students in the entire state of Florida.

And, with an ever-growing and aging population, we need all the qualified nurses we can get. Unfortunately, demand is outpacing supply, so we’re facing a nursing shortage that’s estimated to grow to the hundreds of thousands in 2020.

We have a new breed of university that prepares students to succeed in their chosen field and challenges the status quo, so liberal politicians, of course, are actively working to shut them down. Why support innovation in education and a skilled workforce when you can churn out four-year degrees in fields for which there is no demand?

A few examples of how Congressional Democrats hope to stifle the reach of private colleges and universities:

 *     The “Gainful Employment” rule, which arbitrarily defines how much debt a student can incur based on a chosen degree. If that degree doesn’t offer a high starting salary – a figure determined by government bureaucrats - the government can pursue legal action against the college. 

 *     The “State Authorization” regulation forces colleges offering online courses to obtain an operating license in every state where its students reside. While this regulation clearly was designed to drive private online universities out of business, the real victims are the single parents, veterans and career changers for whom an online degree is their only option.

 *     The “Borrower Defense to Repayment” rule, which allows college students to demand a tuition refund or walk away from their student loans if they believe they have been misled by their institution’s advertising. The end result? Students who are more than happy to hand their student debt over to taxpayers.

Outrageous, right? Par for the course when it comes to the education agenda of the left.

Betsy DeVos is doing a superb job of standing strong against the regulation-loving, innovation-killing Democrats. She is also bringing to light the deficiencies in our outdated education system and she deserves the support of parents who want more opportunities for their children. Time isn’t just running out for my son, it’s running out for a generation of students.

Parents, we must insist the education system do better because our kids deserve better.

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The Academic Truce Has Crumbled

In the late 1960s academia, and particularly the humanities, began to embrace a variety of political causes and incorporate them more overtly into their scholarship. This shift coincided with curricular and intellectual developments that re-envisioned the educator as an activist and tasked him with the pursuit of normative scholarship, typically in service of progressive causes or the ubiquitous concept of “social justice.”

While such emphases fell within the traditional protections and safeguards of academic freedom, they also provoked an intense backlash from conservatives who questioned the propriety of using publicly financed and operated institutions to advance radical political activism.

At its peak in the late 1960s, contentious events such as the firing of communist philosopher Angela Davis from UCLA under the pressure of then-governor Ronald Reagan suggested an imminent collision between faculty political beliefs and the public source of their finances, which were ultimately susceptible to public oversight.

Davis, who possessed only a slim body of scholarly work but was well known for radical Marxist activism, was fired, reinstated, and fired a second time by the university’s board of regents over speech that primarily arose from her political agitation.

For its own part, the political left in the academy responded to the conservatives’ backlash by rallying behind academic freedom and free speech. UCLA received numerous public censures for insufficiently safeguarding the academic freedom of a faculty member.

Interestingly enough, both contestants had intellectually consistent and defensible claims behind their positions – up to a point.

Academic freedom is a bulwark of unimpeded inquiry among faculty, yet as institutions drawing public support, universities also operate under the legitimate purview of public scrutiny and must exercise stewardship over the funds they receive.

We may see this tension in place by way of a thought experiment, using an extreme example. Suppose a specific department at a public university began offering a curriculum that espoused a noxious and discredited viewpoint such as eugenic racial theory, or Holocaust denial, and suppose the faculty members who designed it invoked the protections of academic freedom to pursue this viewpoint, even as it elicited a deserved condemnation from students, other scholars, and the public in general.

Depending on the circumstances, tenure might protect the continued employment of the culprit faculty. But would a state legislature be obliged to fund this program with public resources, knowing that it catered primarily to bigots and hate groups?

How about a somewhat related case where a biology department or medical school began spreading pseudoscientific misinformation that carried tangible threats to public health. Anti-vaccination conspiracy theories come to mind. Would the public be obliged to continue financing this program, knowing that it was instructing students with false information that exposed innocent people to dangerous diseases?

Both hypothetical episodes would necessarily invoke the question of the university’s uses of tax dollars, in addition to the concerning content provided in their respective courses. Protections for faculty speech and the constraints of tenure may limit what a university could do in terms of the employment contracts of the individuals involved.

At the same time though, a tax dollar-funded university – as a steward of public resources – would appear to have both a cause and a reasonable expectation to pull the plug on these particular offerings.

Most collisions between problematic content and the public nature of university finance are not as clear cut, and yet it is the murkier cases that test the reach of this tension. Economist James M. Buchanan explained as much in a little-studied essay on the public finance of higher education, written some four decades ago in the wake of the 1960s controversies.

Universities, Buchanan noted, turned heavily toward a public finance model of operation in the mid-20th century that persists to the present day. Wherever one might stand on the optimal level and extent of public funding for higher education, it cannot be denied that their extension invites public oversight into the many uses of the same appropriations – including asking the question of whether a university’s offerings are serving public priorities as expressed through democratically elected bodies.

Indeed, a major premise of publicly funded universities arises from their expected future returns to positive scientific knowledge, innovation, and general education. These scientific and social contributions ostensibly benefit society at large through both tangible advances in knowledge and a more learned populace – or so it is claimed.

Yet as Buchanan notes, these promises become murkier as the university’s offerings shift away from the hard sciences and into the liberal arts and humanities, where knowledge-generation and instruction often takes on deeply normative characteristics. In the areas where activist scholarship has taken root, he continues, it is not uncommon for faculty to behave as though the taxpaying public has “some sacred obligation to throw increasing amounts of revenues over the universities’ ivied walls without so much as a right to inquire what went on behind those walls.”

If left unattended, Buchanan anticipated an “emergent clash between ‘academic freedom,’ as this is defined by scholars behind the ivied walls, and ‘public finance’” of their institutions. If taken to its conclusion, the public legitimately might decide that tax-supported universities “are not fulfilling the objectives for which they are presumably funded” and vote to withdraw funding.

As a result of forcing the question, only two real options emerge. Universities could choose to forgo further public support, allowing “the precepts of academic freedom to be strictly observed” free from any expectation of a return on their previous stewardship of such funds. This would obviously yield a much smaller and less-well-funded university system, but one free from any obligations to voter expectations, whether we deem those expectations warranted or not. Alternatively, the academy could admit that greater public oversight is an unavoidable tradeoff of taking public appropriations.

Buchanan did not endorse either position, save to note that they were the logical ends of the tension between academic freedom and public finance if the two competing aims continued to be pressed against each other.

We are fortunate that the university funding and content disputes of the late 1960s deescalated over the next few decades. The paths they followed were not without fault and exceptions pitting the two objectives against each other continued to plague the debate, but in the 1970s and 1980s the tension largely gave way to something of an informal truce between its main political contestants.

The academic left acknowledged that the unimpeded content freedom it desired for itself also applied to the minority of faculty hailing from other perspectives, including conservatives and libertarians. And the political right largely backed off the strategy of pressuring trustees to rein in the activist excesses of their institutions and curriculum, lest universities face stricter oversight tied to appropriations. The university system settled into a relatively stable distribution of political content. A clear plurality of the faculty leaned left, to be sure, and openly identified as such in surveys. But faculty from the center and right sides of the spectrum also carved out stable minority stakes in most disciplines.

There are many signs today, however, that the truce is crumbling.

Right-leaning faculty (and libertarians are usually lumped into this category for counting, despite its imperfect description) have all but disappeared from the faculty ranks, dwindling to a mere 12% in the latest surveys. Faculty on the left now constitute a clear majority of some 60% of the university system, and much of this growth was driven by an explosion of professors who identify on the far left. The entirety of this observed shift took place after the early 2000s.

It is more difficult to measure the parallel degradation of the political climate on campus, a subject that will have to wait for another day. But suffice it to say that observations to this effect have intensified in the last few years.

Many faculty on the far left no longer extend the academic freedom norms of a few decades ago to their dwindling counterparts on the right, or really any other part of the political spectrum. They impose ideological litmus tests on new faculty hiring, with significant shares of faculty in several disciplines openly admitting to discriminating against candidates with non-left perspectives. They engage in petition campaigns to have disfavored articles withdrawn from publication. Faculty with disliked and minority political perspectives are impeded from hiring and promotion at elite institutions, even when they have comparable or stronger credentials and research records than their counterparts on the left.

Students with non-left political beliefs routinely report feeling pressures to censor their own beliefs on campus.  And far-left faculty now routinely launch political crusades against disliked funding sources, aiming to block or control their non-leftist colleagues from even accessing money that is necessary to conduct research, support programs, attract students, or hire new faculty to their departments. Instead, conservatives, libertarians, and really any faculty who hail from outside perspectives are often depicted as intruders on the academic domain who got there through “illegitimate” means and must be blocked or purged from academic life. The paranoid style has come full circle and taken refuge in the illiberal corners of the academic far-left.

Part of this purge mentality is also a response to the glutted academic job market in these same fields, which breeds a way of thinking about faculty jobs as a zero-sum game: if new faculty jobs are scarce relative to the number of job seekers, then we – as humanities faculty of the left – must proactively ensure that they all go to our fellow ideological travelers first.

In short, a growing subset of the academic left has effectively replaced traditional viewpoint liberalism – a perspective that valued free exchange and a diversity of perspectives, even as it maintained its own pluralities – with an echo chamber of hardline progressivism and the academically fashionable realm of Critical Theory.

Not to be outdone, the political right in the United States appears to be responding by turning against higher education itself. Its motives and causes vary, including a growing perception of bias against or persecution of non-left voices on campus. Some of this agitation has taken on a conspiratorial flavor, whereas other dimensions do seem to be grounded in empirical realities. But its cumulative effect is a resumption of pressures to take a closer look at the university’s purse strings.

So far this process has amounted to more talk than action, but we recently saw signs of it at the University of Alaska, which drastically cut back on its funding and degree offerings (although political compromise later softened their severity). Other proposals aim to tie funding restrictions to on-campus free speech policies, or to steer more students into STEM programs, which tend to exhibit a greater political balance among their faculty – or steer away from political content and activism as primary features of their instruction.

It is not my aim to endorse or oppose any of these propositions. Some faculty on the left have responded to them in furious rage, whereas an alarming number of conservative populists seem to relish in dismantling university funding even if done haphazardly and for reasons of ideological retribution. Rather, my point is to note that each response is a predictable reaction to the erosion of the previous truce between a diverse conception of academic freedom and the extension of public funding.

If faculty wish to forestall and reverse budgetary backlash against public investments in higher education, they should not scoff at concerns over the changing and increasingly one-sided ideological climate on campus. Neither should they dismiss the more responsible voices who raise concerns about exclusionary practices and epistemic closure in the most afflicted disciplines.

Forestalling these trends requires a proactive commitment to reestablishing the academic freedom truce of previous decades, as the alternative is a collision between the one-sided political activism of the faculty ranks and the public’s willingness to continue subsidizing careers in the same. Should that collision resume, both sides will likely emerge worse off.

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The Collegiate War Against Men

While many have commented on the eight year decline in college enrollments in the United States, no one, to my knowledge, has noted that most of that fall in the number attending college in the past four years is concentrated among men. Between 2015 and 2019, according to the National College Clearinghouse, the number of men on campuses declined by 691,643, almost double the smaller fall among women, 348,955. In percentage terms, the male decline of 8.34 % was far more than double that among women, 3.18%.

Women have for decades outnumbered men in America’s colleges. In 2015, there were 32% more women than men, but now the differential is nearly 40%. For every five men, there are seven women. The fundamental question is why—not only do far more women attend college than men, but why is the differential growing noticeably in the past few years?

While several factors may be at work, I think at least part of the reason is a perception among males that colleges dislike them—or at least do not like them as much as women. There are several forms of discrimination against males that are increasingly turning men off to the collegiate experience. They don’t like being second class citizens.

Some forms of gender discrimination are seemingly rather mild and well intended. For example, noting male domination of enrollment in some of the STEM disciplines such as engineering and mathematics, some schools have created Women in Science scholarships, research grants, or the like to encourage more women to enter these fields. Curiously, though, I do not see attempts to right the gender imbalance favoring females in most other disciplines, including some relatively high paying fields like nursing (where roughly 90 % of graduates are female).

But the past decade has seen many examples of more blatant maltreatment of men on campus. The U.S. Department of Education’s 2011 “guidance” in sexual assault cases led to colleges pursuing brutal, and in my judgment, un-American, Spanish Inquisition type actions in sexual assault cases. Males accused of sexual assault were often denied opportunities to cross-examination accusers, were denied effective use of legal counsel, often denied the right to present exculpatory evidence, and sometimes judged by the very persons prosecuting them.

KC Johnson’s book with Stuart Taylor, The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities, outlines scores of cases of injustices directed exclusively towards men. And the number of judicial decisions favoring males poorly treated in college Kangaroo Courts has soared in recently years.

Still other forms of discriminatory treatment exist caused by school administrators heavily influenced by progressive identity politics. Most notorious perhaps has been Harvard’s attack on “single-gender social organizations,” especially fraternities. The university president declared such organizations violated “our deeply rooted gender values.” Harvard once did have “deeply rooted gender values” when it would not let women attend. But that went by the wayside roughly a half century ago. As I noted last February, who decided these new “gender values” for Harvard and why are men discriminated against because they want to belong to a social club of guys?

To be sure, other factors are at work as well. Males are far more likely to be incarcerated than women, and thus denied access to higher education. I expect the rise of public assistance payments over the last 80 years has reduced the especially critical male economic role in families—now women can survive financially with their children without a male present, as the government will provide income. Who needs a man? The number of women workers soon will pass the number of men. College still confers some financial advantages on workers—and more and more, those workers are women.

The move by the Trump Administration’s Department of Education away from supporting dubious disciplinary procedures in sexual assault cases, along with the growing judicial backlash against unjust decisions, may trigger a reversal of the anti-male environment. But for now, some men increasingly feel they are treated like inferior members of the campus community. Thus more of them are going to work in private sector jobs where identity politics working through “diversity and inclusion” policies are less pervasive.

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