The Pushback Against College Life

Well, it seems that people are finally doing a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to college in general.

Many of the schools Mr. Brandon describes are education-free zones, where students' eternal obligations—do the assigned reading, participate in class, hand in assignments—no longer apply. The book's title refers to the fact that only 30% of students enrolled in liberal-arts colleges graduate in four years. Roughly 60% take at least six years to get their degrees. That may be fine with many schools, whose administrators see dollar signs in those extra semesters.

The capitalist in me sees this as perfectly understandable behavior to keep the kids using your product as long as humanly possible. However, if they go through these lengths then they need to be exposed.

In an effort to win applicants, Mr. Brandon says, colleges dumb down the curriculum and inflate grades, prod students to take out loans they cannot afford, and cover up date rape and other undergraduate crime. The members of the faculty go along with the administration's insistence on lowering standards out of fear of losing their jobs.

I have to agree that there are big problems with colleges and they should be addressed before Obama throws even more money their way in his plan to pump out 8 million more graduates. Many people are finally coming to the understanding that the only true value in college is in the hard sciences and business.

Everything else is a waste of money. Anyone majoring in something with a two word title like Interpretive Dance is just taking tens of thousands of dollars and setting them on fire. About the only thing the liberal arts portion of college is good for is getting people into law school.

Campuses are full of anti-American dinosaurs like Ward Churchill who cannot be fired because they are tenured up the hilt. I mean some political science departments should just change their names to Communist Studies. Leftist sentiment where America is evil, capitalism is wrong, and our enemies have a point seem to be everywhere.

The worst part is that parents keep shelling out larger and larger piles of money to subsidize the jobs of people like Churchill. I hope books like The Five-Year Party can get more parents to think about not only where they send their kids but what they are learning there as well.