The College Crisis
One of the United States’ great assets is in decline and we only have our greed to blame.
I graduated from Marist College (now Marist University) in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in political science. I am a second-generation college graduate. In fact, I am a second-generation college graduate on both sides of my family. My father, a teacher, and my mother, a civil servant, both earned degrees, with my mother going a step further and earning a master’s. One of my enduring memories as a child was receiving a Princeton sweatshirt when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old. It was my dream school for years. In my house, it was understood that, no matter what, my sister and I would get our degrees in something, even if it was basket weaving.
I can safely say that my undergraduate career is a highlight in my life. I made lifelong friends and enjoyed the freedom of having, for the first time, no direct authority nagging me when to sleep or where to go. Most importantly, my experiences in college led me to find my life’s calling as an educator and an artist. It was truly where I found myself. It’s also where, for the first time, I was exposed to a large population of people who didn’t look or live like I did, as well as a large portion of people who shared my interests, my heritage and my dreams. Even at my tiny school on the Hudson with fewer than 3,000 students, I woke up every day to a microcosm of what the “real world” was like beyond the bubble that was my college campus.
I left college with debt, and at the time it felt like an anvil around my wallet, but I was free of it by the time I reached my mid-30s. A small price to pay for the cultured experience, expert instruction and real-world life lessons I carried on. If my personal anecdotes don’t make it clear, I am a huge proponent of college.
That’s the reason that over the past several years it’s been difficult to watch what’s happened all over the country in regard to the state of our academic institutions. I can’t believe my ears as I advise high school students on alternatives to a four-year degree. My mother is rolling over in her grave, and my father, if he heard those words leave my lips, might disown me. The reality is, college is no longer the guaranteed key to future success.
A bachelor’s degree statistically can still put you in a higher earning position over the long term than your peers; however, it is double and in some cases triple the cost it was a generation ago with little promise of a career job. What once was one of the most assured ways to access, at the bare minimum, a middle class existence, has now become as much of a crapshoot as playing three-card monty.
A gig economy is partially responsible for this. The democratization of information and lowering of the bar to its access via the internet is partially responsible for this. Of course, the rise of tuition parallel to the rise in student loan debt is also a part of this. Decade upon decade, we’ve quietly eroded the quality and experience college students have on campuses across the country.
From 2010 to 2021, college enrollment declined by 15% in the United States. Some of the reasons I’ve already stated above are a contributing cause. There now is an even more deadly factor, and that is the current political climate. For several decades now, academic institutions have been foundations for independent and free thought. Liberal arts colleges, especially, created spaces for young minds to find their voice and moral center and develop the critical thinking skills necessary to compete not only here but on a world stage.
Even before Trump’s rise to the presidency in the first term, the country's sweeping conservatism had begun to put that under threat, but now the Trump administration has re-weaponized far-right ideals in a way that we haven’t seen since the days of the Vietnam War. In fact, Trump has taken it to levels we have never seen, blatantly withholding funds if schools don’t submit to the very thinly veiled white supremacy agenda he is pushing once again in his second term.
The damage that is being caused is clear and the ramifications will be felt in the not-too-distant future. Students are looking elsewhere to find opportunities and build futures for themselves. And as they do, the country not only loses the cultivation of some of our greatest minds, but also the spaces that cultivate the very ideals of freedom and equity that we claim the country is built on.
As countries such as India, China and Japan continue to prioritize higher education and a more literate society, they continue to nudge ahead of the U.S. in the most competitive job sectors, such as technology and design. U.S. companies have long taken notice and continue to double down on the brain drain that’s occurring in our country.
No amount of tariffs or creative accounting will bring the U.S. back into the global market. The idea of the American dream is barely a passing thought in these times, and what we as a country celebrated — being among the best and the brightest in science, math and the arts — has long been a myth as the greed and amoral practices of our politicians, corporations and, sadly, much of the leadership in academia continue to mortgage the future of the country on short-term personal gains.
The results will ultimately be devastating and not simply from an economic standpoint. Fascism thrives and can only persist in a demoralized, uneducated and disconnected populace. The country, already deeply divided, only fractures further as the foundations of knowledge, thought and prosperity for decades continues to crumble. We may be losing much more than a way of life as our greatest institutions and the symbols of much of our freedoms falter. Time will tell if there will be a chance at redemption.
