College seniors will be graduating this month with over $35,000 in student loan debt to enter a workforce that does not want them. These young Americans are the latest victims of a bloated and dysfunctional higher education system that must slim down and get serious for the good of future generations.
For too long, arrogant universities have wrongly assumed they can be all things to all people while continuing to perform at the highest levels of service, academic research, and teaching. They promise belonging, recreation, counseling, activism, and entertainment that is tailored to each individual, yet still bound by a mass-marketed brand identity. That model is financially and intellectually ruinous.
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This misguided assumption has materialized as administrative glut at the expense of academic investment. Ornate buildings and landscaping, amenity-filled dorm rooms, and suites of counselors attending to fragile victimhood psyches typify undergraduates’ college experiences. In total, the average four-year institution unnecessarily spends 65% more on services than on academic support.
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The result? College students and recent college graduates are coddled with toys and therapy animals and subsequently underprepared for the workforce. Their inability to weather discomfort makes them broadly incapable of reading entire books and less intelligent than past generations.
Generation Z is already the first age cohort of people to do “worse in school than the generation before them,” so it is time to reverse course before more people fall behind.
U.S. higher education needs to de-gentrify its campuses and re-center academics. The future must belong to slimmer universities: fewer students, fewer amenities, fewer activities, and fewer expenses. If colleges want to recover their public mission as cultivators of higher learning, they need to adopt a degree of asceticism resembling the discipline of cloistered religious institutions.
That process begins with Americans confronting the uncomfortable truth that higher education has spent years avoiding. A four-year college is not for everyone, and it should not be for everyone.
While no student should be denied an education or reasonable accommodations due to their identities or disabilities, it is a fallacy that everyone needs to attend a university. A healthy society needs many forms of education: apprenticeships, technical training, certificate programs, community colleges, military service, direct workforce entry, and adult education. The four-year university is just one option; bachelor’s degrees weren’t that common until the GI Bill increased enrollment after World War II. Four-year institutions don’t need to be responsive to every individual’s needs or expectations.
Now, colleges admit ever-larger classes, not because every accepted applicant is ready for serious academic work, but because expansion keeps tuition dollars flowing and sustains a bloated campus ecosystem that depends on exponential growth to survive. To keep the operation going, universities must market experience over education to increase applications and raise tuition prices to nearly $100,000 per year at private institutions.
If colleges are serious about reform, they must shrink. They should enroll fewer students and stop measuring success by head count. A smaller student body would allow institutions to focus on those who are genuinely prepared to meet academic demands with discipline.
They should also slash their budgets and embrace a culture of austerity. College should not be punitive or joyless, but neither should it resemble a sleepaway camp for emerging adults. Every new campus amenity, office, and initiative serves as a permanent overhead cost increase of doing business. Similar to tourists boarding a cruise ship, where families end up paying premium prices for a package that includes many things they do not need or want.
Instead of amenities and experiences, colleges need to spend on their core product: education. That means investing in the best faculty possible.
While wealthy institutions such as Stanford University cried poverty over frozen federal funding while boasting unnecessary expenditures, they also underpaid part-time adjunct instructors who make up roughly 40% of faculty.
Too many valuable instructors are relegated to adjunct status and have no security or voice in institutional operations. Meanwhile, a radicalized aristocracy of tenured professors holds a monopoly of power over hiring, curriculum design, and academic culture, in league with administrators who spearhead unsustainable fundraising and spending.
Extra savings would enable universities to diversify viewpoints among their faculties and provide students with a well-rounded education. Liberal professors are not just supermajorities across faculties; several universities such as UCLA have staff that give 100% of their political donations to Democratic candidates and 0% to Republicans.
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The more higher education encompasses the full spectrum of mainstream political thought in the United States, the better served students will be by their education. Viewpoint diversity among faculty equips students to think critically and discuss hard truths with civility and tolerance.
American higher education does not need another glossy rebrand. It needs a moral and institutional reset. De-gentrifying campuses would not solve every problem, but it would force colleges to act according to their core missions and limitations.
Zachary Marschall, PhD, is editor-in-chief of Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform and an adjunct assistant professor of arts administration at the University of Kentucky.
