This couldn’t go on and it didn’t. The cost to support this bloated pyramid scheme was rising too fast while the peasants were revolting at the sticker shock. College just cost too much, and people began to realize that they simply were not getting value for the money. Further, technology was making the old model of having some tenured jerk droning on to an auditorium of hungover sophomores a thing of the past. Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to live in residence at Deadend State when you could go online and get a Science 101 lecture from a Nobel Prize winner for free?
In the end, it was pretty clear that the real product these schools were selling was a diploma. When the high-prestige schools figured out how to credential students online, and that became widely accepted, it was adios academia as we knew it. The low-end schools just couldn’t compete, and the high-end ones had to change to meet the realities of cost and new technology. The traditional university model of a few decades ago is a specialty model now—most college courses are online and 90 percent of students are nonresidents, living real lives and fitting in education around careers.
Politically, academia was a festering boil of progressivism that had to be lanced. We were always focused on the culture, and academia was a huge component of that. Protected from accountability by tenure and the unearned prestige of their positions, academics turned the “best” schools in the country into training grounds for little liberal fascists, ruthlessly enforcing their own creepy little police states of politically correct oppression. Nothing is more conservative than a liberal faculty, and they tried to resist but their old model of a university was dying.
It was time to kick them when they were down.
First, conservatives fought the idea that every kid needs to go to college. This was a very tough sell with the middle class, particularly because they had been used to seeing a university education as a ticket upwards for their children. But now they were seeing the opposite with their own eyes—their kids were coming home with their bags and a diploma, smothered in debt, unable to find decent work in the Obama/Clinton economy.
With money tight and prices astronomical, parents were a bit more open to the idea that their kid might be better off being a plumber instead of getting a degree in contemporary feminist theater and fixing artisanal coffee drinks for the rest of his life.
Conservatives supported trade schools in high schools—if you were a certified electric vehicle technician, you couldn’t not get a job. Now, this ran up against the teachers unions and the campaigns to centralize education standards like the failed Common Core program Obama and a bunch of squishy Republicans tried to foist on the country during the teens. This old guard wanted to retain the old, failed model—too many Democratic constituents in the teachers unions were too invested in it to let there be reform without a fight.
It was in the red states where constitutional conservative governors and legislators started making the real changes. Of course, the biggest and most important change was outlawing public employee unions. When the teachers unions started to go away, then the biggest obstacle to real education reform was gone.
We backed other key reforms too. At the university level, we first started linking student loans to majors, at least until we could eliminate government loans and grants entirely.
If you wanted to be physics major, sure, here was your loan at 5 percent. There was a place for physics majors in society. But if you wanted to major in the ethnomusicology of Angola? Awesome. Live your dream. The interest rate was 12 percent because, well, your dream was stupid and there was no good reason the rest of us had to pay a dime to help you achieve it.
Interested in majoring in sociology? I think we charged 22 percent! It was even more useless. The same with any kind of racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual preference “studies.” Those idiotic, pseudomajors actually made America a worse place. The academics, of course, went nuts. It was delightful.
And no loans for law school. We had too damn many lawyers already.
Of course, the variable student loan rates were only an interim step. The Constitution says nothing about subsidizing people’s higher education, and the program was simply a stealth subsidy for a Democratic constituency anyway. We ended the government student loan program completely in 2030, and while fewer people graduate from college today, employers have responded by not demanding a degree where the position really doesn’t require one.
Oh, there are still private student loans you can get from private companies, but they are not government subsidized or government backed. And they are not exempt from being discharged in bankruptcy. That’s why lenders are very careful about their loans these day.
The sell got easier over time as people changed their views about higher education. We asked, “Why should we subsidize nonsense?” We let the Democrats explain why some mom working 50 hours a week then having to take care of her kids should pay taxes to let some jerk get a performance art degree from Princeton.
Sure, there were some real majors, and science training was and is important, but those weren’t the issue and those weren’t the problem. We all knew the problem because we all saw it when we went to school. The academic elite was unaccountable, untouchable, and always greedy for more.
We conservatives decided to crush it.
We hit them in the pocketbook, where it hurt. Some of the institutions had ungodly amounts of cash squirreled away, like my own alma mater Harvard, yet they let Uncle Sucker keep picking up the tab. We started requiring them to pay out a minimum of 10 percent of their endowment annually to be eligible for any federal aid of any kind and to remain tax-free. You would have thought we were killing puppies on the library steps!
Our goal? Shrink the liberal industrial complex by getting rid of marginal, bogus schools that served no purpose other than to employ its left-wing employees. This made sense fiscally, policy-wise, and it supported our effort to eliminate progressivism as a viable alternative to conservatism.
Oh, let’s be clear. Hastening the destruction of academia as it used to be was not just about education policy. We learned from liberals—destroy your enemies by doing whatever it took. Academia was perhaps the most solid base of progressivism in the culture. Academia had ruthlessly purged any conservative elements from its ranks. We needed to be just as ruthless. A bunch of otherwise marginally employable losers, called “academics,” somehow managed to get themselves permanent gigs at society’s expense and use it as a base to wreck society. We needed to go after them.
In the states we controlled, we eliminated tenure—just ended it outright. We called it what it was—an accountability measure. Later, at the federal level, we linked interim student loan funding to “tenure reform.” If you wanted your professors untouchable, you didn’t get to touch our money. The universities folded.
But even as we helped the market break up academia, we attacked their reign of campus terror. We were especially effective at the state level where we controlled the legislatures.
We strengthened discrimination laws to expressly cover political viewpoints, and then we helped conservatives shut out of academia to sue. There was nothing that got the attention of an administrator like getting served with a lawsuit. It was all progressive fun and games until someone was handed a subpoena to a deposition to explain why there were 58 Democrats in the English Department and zero Republicans. Boy, it was fun watching them try to explain that.
We pushed free speech laws that barred the academic fascists from harassing and silencing people simply for expressing their conservative beliefs. We made the liberals show that they were the party of repression and censorship by opposing these commonsense reforms.