Add Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk to the growing list of successful people who are calling out colleges and universities and urging students either to delay enrolling or to think past the institutions when considering their futures.
In what amounts to a 10-count indictment of mostly liberal higher education, Kirk on Tuesday is releasing his new book that details how colleges and universities rip off and sometimes indoctrinate students, leaving them with big bills and inadequate training for jobs.
The leader of the political group focused on those in high school and college told Secrets that “many of them don’t want to be in college. They feel as if it’s a waste of time. They also feel as if college is ripping them off.”
Kirk, who just hosted over 5,000 student activists and former President Donald Trump in Tampa, Florida, at the Student Action Summit, added, “I think our audience will be pleased that somebody’s willing to fight the regime that is currently oppressing them.”
He has a unique perspective in writing The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth. Kirk was encouraged to start Turning Point USA out of high school and never attended college. He jokes about taking a “gap decade.”
Since students are his main audience, he has made over 100 visits to campuses and has established thousands of college and high school chapters.
What’s more, in making those visits, he has seen how colleges and educators operate, and he uses what he has seen to make the case for alternative paths for high school graduates, including taking a gap year or jumping straight into businesses.
“I’m the best and worst person to write the book because I could show that you can make something happen by not going to college. Some of my critics will say, ‘Oh, what does he know about college because he didn’t actually go.’ Well, I addressed that where I visited over 100 campuses with Turning Point USA and starting high school and college chapters all across the country. And I think I have a better pulse of really what’s going on in higher education than almost anybody else,” Kirk said. “This has been about a decade in the making.”
On some of his visits to campuses, Kirk slipped into large classes and saw where professors sometimes offer poor lessons or push a political point of view. He also cited data showing that colleges are charging more while operating for fewer and fewer days.
Also disturbing was his data that showed nearly half of college students in one study learned nothing after two years. And he included examples of “phantom” classes created for athletes and others that gave out grades even though attendance wasn’t required.
And maybe worst of all are the claims he cited from employers that some college graduates are unemployable.
In his book, he wrote, “This brings us to Count 4 of our 10-count indictment of the college industry: ‘Colleges do not educate anymore.’ Students literally go through the college system and emerge having learned nothing at all. As a result, employers are concluding, ‘We can’t hire college grads. They can’t do the job. College has ruined them as potential employees.’”
He gave credit to some conservative colleges, including Liberty University, Hillsdale College, and Patrick Henry College, but he generally faulted the model as permanently broken.
Kirk is the New York Times bestselling author of The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas that Will Win the Future from Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
His new book is being published by Winning Team Publishing, founded by Donald Trump Jr. and Sergio Gor, and is promoted on a new website CollegeScam.com. It is the team’s second book after it published former President Donald Trump’s Our Journey Together, a collection of behind-the-scenes photos and personal notes.
In writing it, Kirk said he hopes to join with others in showing that choosing a noncollege path after high school is just as respectable as a four-year education.
“Where I grew up in my local neighborhood and the people I grew up with, I could say that the kids that were heavily addicted to drugs and alcohol were definitely treated better than the kids that didn’t go to college,” Kirk said. “Not going to college is considered to be the greatest failure you can have in upper-middle-class, suburban Chicago. The drug and the drug addict, as long as they got a piece of paper from the University of Iowa, they were great. No one asked any questions. And but if you didn’t go to college, the alarm bells went off but we’re changing that.”
