Victor Davis Hanson: Why America’s Universities Are Falling Apart

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.

There’s been a lot of news lately about the university’s higher education crisis, and universities are now competing for students rather than students competing with each other to get into universities.  

Maybe the elite universities still, because of their brand name, although they’ve suffered a great deal and their admissions reflect that and their applications are down, they’ll always make it—the seven or eight so-called top tier. 

But most four-year colleges and universities are in a bad strait. And why is that? 

First of all, it’s demography. During the 1960s, the fertility rate reached, in 1960, about 3.6 children per family. It’s recovered a little bit the last three years, but it’s 1.7. So, the cohort of 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds is less than half. 

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So, they are competing for a much smaller pool of young people. 

The second thing that’s really turned people off is that tuition has increased, over the last 50 years, three times more than the annual rate of inflation.  

Now, why is that? 

Mostly it is because of administrative bloat.  

Where I work, at Stanford University, The Wall Street Journal recently suggested that if you count graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford, and you count administrators and their staff, there is roughly one administrator or staffer for every student. 

This is because the university became in loco parentis. It said, “I am a parent, and I’m going to monitor the 360-degree, 24/7 life of a student. If he’s not happy, we’re gonna deal with it. If somebody accuses you of sexual harassment, we’re gonna deal with it. We’re gonna deal with everything, and we’re going to try to be political. 

“Our job is not disinterested, inductive education. It is to turn out left-wing people who can offer an antithesis to the family, nuclear family, the community, religion, etc. We believe society is biased with corporations and family and religion, and we’re gonna offer an antithesis.

That turned off people, believe me. 

Professors themselves are unique in American life. Nobody else has the same conditions of employment. After six years, they get tenure. Outside the exclusive schools, it’s almost automatic. Where I worked at the [California State University], I think 90% of assistant professors got tenure. 

Release time is very common now. You can say, “I want to be a part-time administrator,” or “I am tutoring,” or “I have a special project,” and you can get a reduced teaching load. 

Remember that the teaching load has gone way down. In most colleges, it’s between two and four courses a year. A year. 

Maybe not at the CSU, but even CSU has gone down on many campuses. That’s the California State University system, the largest in the world. It has gone from four classes to three classes a semester. 

And part of the way that they finesse that was when you increase the administrative budget and you increase release time for full-time faculty and decrease teaching, you hire part-time, temporary lecturers, and you exploit them. 

You pay them about 40% per class of what you would pay a full or associate professor. You don’t really give them the same type of benefits. And at some universities, the percentage of courses that are taught by part-time, exploited lecturers is getting up to 40% and even 45%. 

Another thing that turned the public off about these universities: They grant-gouge. 

We’re starting to learn that, say, on NIH grants, many of these universities were charging not 10% or 15% commission, but 40% and even higher. 

In other words, if a professor got a million-dollar grant from the federal government, a university would step in and say, “Well, you’re using your office or your phone or your lab, so we want 40% of it.” 

And they use that because the whole system is financially unsound. Financially unsound. 

Largely because, again, of administrative bloat and the creation of centers and programs that have nothing to do with education but form a huge overhead. 

Another thing that got people very worried is another way they financed this debt, expanded their administrators, and cut back on teaching: They brought in over a million foreign students. 

And unlike American students, there are no scholarships. There are no discounts. Foreign students pay the premium, if not a little bit higher tuition. 

Now, the problem with that is when you bring in 300,000 students from China or over 200,000 from the illiberal Middle East, and when you look at the origin of most of these students, they are from autocratic and illiberal places in Africa, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere, particularly the Middle East and China. 

Then you start to politicize the student body, and you can see what happened after Oct. 7. 

We had enormous demonstrations, often led by foreign students, chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” That’s essentially code for destroying the state of Israel. 

And we had violent demonstrations often led by people from the Middle East. 

And, of course, the FBI suggests that 1% to 5% of Chinese students are actively engaged in espionage. 

The public knows this, and they’re not fond of that idea—that sometimes their children don’t get into school because the universities are letting in foreign students because they pay a premium. 

DEI did damage—diversity, equity, inclusion. 

The idea that the universities, despite state referenda and Supreme Court decisions and the Civil Rights Act, were deliberately, consciously, insidiously using race as a barometer to admit people, to hire people, to retain people, and to promote people on the basis of their superficial appearance, their sexual orientation, or their gender. 

It was entirely anti-meritocratic. It was like the Soviet commissar system. It was like the McCarthy period. 

If you wanted to get a job at a university, you had to fill out, in most cases, a diversity statement. 

And believe me, if you wrote on that diversity statement, “Honestly, I believe that DEI is anti-meritocratic,” you were not going to be hired. 

There’s another reason that these universities are in crisis. 

The federal government came in and guaranteed student loans. 

Once they did that, the universities jacked up the rate of tuition, as I said, three times higher on an annual basis than the inflation rate. 

So the government came in and said, “You guys can loan students money, and we will back it up, so they will pay you back with federally guaranteed dollars.” 

And we know now that there’s a 30% to 35% non-compliance rate, that people are either late or have defaulted. 

And so, when you have $1.7 trillion in debt and you see that the debt is increasing because the students are not graduating in four years—the average graduation now is six years. 

About 30% to 40% of people who enter college do not ever graduate. 

But the whole thing is subsidized by loans from banks that are guaranteed by the federal government, and that gave a green light for universities to offer these crazy courses that nobody wants—peace studies, race studies, Black studies, environmental studies, etc., studies—because the students took them and the government paid for them. 

And nobody worried about whether they graduated or whether employers found a well-educated and empirical product coming out with a B.A. 

Finally, we’re short a couple million plumbers, electricians, blue-collar carpenters, sheet rockers, and roofers. 

These are very important to the economy of the United States. 

But when these universities said, “Come to us, and maybe even if you don’t graduate—40% of you—or if those who do average six years, and even though you’re gonna run up a big debt, you can take psych and sociology. It’s a good time to kind of float around, live in your basement, and have a good time in your 20s.” 

But the economy answered back: We’re wasting kids’ formative years in their 20s. 

We need master electricians. We need oil workers. We need skilled carpenters. 

And the irony is that if you graduate with a bachelor’s degree in psychology or sociology versus being a master electrician at the age of 22, the electrician these days is going to be making $100,000-plus, and the sociology B.A., or the person with two or three years of psychology, is either going to be unemployed or not using that education at all in employment. 

Or, if he is hired, he will be making half of what the electrician or the roofer or the carpenter makes. 

Add it all up, and the universities are in bad shape, and they’re in desperate need of coerced reform because they will not reform on their own. 

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