Higher Education’s Crisis of Trust, Cost, and Ideology

Higher Education’s Crisis of Trust, Cost, and Ideology

In a recent podcast, Victor Davis Hanson discussed the recent enrollment crisis in American higher education. Many colleges now compete for students rather than students competing for admission. He traced the decline to converging pressures: decreased birthrates, tuition rising faster than inflation, administrative bloat, politicized campus life, tenure and reduced teaching loads, reliance on underpaid part-time lecturers, heavy grant overhead, dependence on full-paying foreign students, DEI mandates, federally guaranteed student loans, weak graduation outcomes, and neglect of the skilled trades. It is a sweeping indictment, and it explains why the crisis is not temporary but structural.

Begin with demography. Hanson noted that the U.S. fertility rate was about 3.6 children per woman around 1960 and is now roughly 1.7. That helps explain why colleges can no longer count on an endless stream of traditional-age students. But demography is only the first pressure point. The deeper problem is that universities have made themselves too expensive, too ideological, and too insulated from the practical needs of families and society.

Hanson’s analysis prompted me to compare the country today with where it stood 50 years ago. In 1976, the U.S. population was about 218 million. Today it is roughly 342 million. America has grown by more than half, even as the birthrate has fallen sharply. It has also aged. In the mid-1970s, approximately half of Americans were under 30. Today, that share is closer to 40 percent. Lower fertility rates and an aging population have changed the demographic foundations on which many colleges once relied.

Enrollment tells the same story in institutional form. Fifty years ago, total college enrollment stood at roughly 11 million students. By 2010, postsecondary enrollment had peaked at about 21 million. Then the boom broke. Federal education data show undergraduate enrollment falling from 18.1 million in 2010 to 15.4 million in 2021, a 15 percent decline. Even recent estimates placing total postsecondary enrollment near 19 million remain below the 2010 peak, and that figure includes about one million foreign students.

College costs have risen sharply over the past half-century. According to historical data, average tuition and required fees at four-year institutions were about $1,200 in 1976–77, or roughly $6,200 in 2022–23 dollars. By 2022–23, they had risen to about $17,700. This increase extended beyond tuition. Average tuition, fees, room, and board at four-year institutions totaled about $2,600 in 1976–77. By 2022–23, the comparable figure had risen to about $30,900. These figures show the broad increase in the total cost of attendance borne by students and families.

The political profile of higher education has changed just as dramatically. Fifty years ago, college graduates were more politically balanced. Today, the education divide is central to American politics. The Pew Research Center has reported that voters without a bachelor’s degree lean Republican by about 51 percent to 45 percent—college-educated voters—and especially postgraduate voters—lean overwhelmingly Democratic. Among postgraduate voters, the Democratic advantage has been especially large: close to 60 percent Democratic or Democratic-leaning versus 35 percent Republican or Republican-leaning. The university has become less a neutral house of learning than an incubator of political and cultural grievances.

Herein lies the paradox. Compared with the mid-1970s, the number of students remains far higher. If total enrollment has grown from roughly 11 million to about 19 million, that is an increase of approximately 70 percent. Universities became larger, richer, more bureaucratic, and more culturally influential. Yet, for most Americans, they also became narrower, more ideological, and less worthy of trust. The institutions expanded; their legitimacy contracted.

Young men, especially whites, appear to have received the message. Discriminatory policies and social-engineering efforts have signaled to many of them that the university is no longer a welcoming institution. The broader male decline is visible in the data: in fall 2021, women made up 58 percent of undergraduate enrollment and men 42 percent. Between 2010 and 2021, male undergraduate enrollment fell by 17 percent, from 7.8 million to 6.5 million. These numbers do not explain every cause but reveal a serious alienation from what was once assumed to be a central path into adulthood and professional life.

The growth of the college-educated class over the past 50 years has also strengthened leftist policies and anti-Western cultural sentiment. Universities expanded access based on identity politics. They also expanded credentialism, bureaucracy, ideological conformity, and programs built around grievance rather than competence. Many graduates now leave with staggering debts, uncertain job prospects, and degrees that teach them to indict the civilization that made their education possible rather than to preserve, improve, or serve it. The result is an elite class that may possess diplomas but often lacks independence of judgment, common sense, and marketable skills.

The remedy is not to destroy higher education, though it currently does more harm than good. It is to stop financing its corruption. Taxpayers should not be compelled to underwrite institutions that promote anti-American programs, ideological conformity, racial preferences, and contempt for the civilization that sustains them. Government funding should be withdrawn from such institutions and, within reasonable limits, redirected toward education that serves students, families, and the country: serious study, vocational competence, scientific literacy, civic responsibility, entrepreneurship, and the formation of capable citizens who can thrive in a free society.

Universities once justified public trust because they formed disciplined minds, transmitted knowledge, and served the nation’s future. If they now prefer ideology to truth, bureaucracy to teaching, grievance to gratitude, and dependency to competence, they should not be surprised when the public turns away. Higher education can be rescued only by recovering the virtues it abandoned: truth, merit, discipline, intellectual courage, national confidence, and civilizational stewardship. Without that recovery, the crisis will not be a passing enrollment problem. It will be a lasting judgment.

Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar & Project Manager at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.

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