Professor Glenn Reynolds: Wokeness Could Destroy Higher Education

You may know Professor Reynolds as the creator of the Instapundit blog.

He writes at the New York Post:

How the wokeness it pushes could destroy higher education“Get woke, go broke.” It’s a phrase people coined to describe the failure of Hollywood’s recent politics-drenched efforts at blockbuster films, from which viewers stayed away in droves. But now it applies to another field: higher education.College and graduate degrees were comparatively rare before about 1970. People could be quite successful without them, and there was little stigma attached to their absence.That changed as the baby boomers and the GI Bill hit colleges. By the 1970s, college became an essential ticket to entry in the managerial and professional classes (and even to military promotions). Where higher ed had once been a luxury, it became a necessity to membership in the middle, and especially the upper-middle, class…That system is falling apart. Higher education’s enormous costs, which have grown at a rate exceeding that of most other items in today’s budgets, have become such that even a good job as a doctor or lawyer often isn’t enough to justify them, and hardly any other professional jobs even come close.As a result, college enrollments are plummeting — nationwide undergraduate enrollment fell by 650,000 in a single year, spring 2021 to 2022. It’s down 14% in the past decade, even as the US population grows.But there’s a new wrinkle. It’s not just colleges that are “woke,” it’s also employers. And woke employers are pursuing a new strategy that may make colleges go broke faster, as notions of “equity” and “privilege” popular on campus spread to the corporate world.As The Post reported recently, some employers are asking applicants to leave the colleges they attended off their applications. Instead of the school, they are simply to list the degree. Whether it came from Harvard or Slippery Rock won’t matter anymore because the employer doesn’t want to know. Prestige degrees confer “privilege,” you know, and that’s bad for equity.

As Professor Reynolds would say, read the whole thing.

Tags: College Insurrection, Law Professors, Progressives, Social Justice

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