It’s a shame the author chose to use this essay to swipe at DeSantis because he otherwise highlights an important problem.
I believe one of the main reasons for the existence of so many third-rate colleges is to maintain the illusion of opportunity. We have been socialized to believe white collar office jobs, typically filled by graduates, are preferable to blue collar manual jobs. But the well-paid office jobs of yesteryear are fast disappearing and most university graduates will not find such employment, but they still have hope that something will show up, and they’re probably not much interested in manual labor.
If the university system shrinks, and the path to white collar professions is heavily restricted, there will be a huge, dissatisfied population of young people unless society places greater value on blue collar occupations or reimagines the very nature of work.

In the final week of term in London, the situation is remarkably similar in the UK. Attendance-optional lectures, self-service Extenuating Circumstances resulting in neverending assignment deadlines, copycat exam formats where critical thinking is de minimis, enormous numbers of high paying overseas students who pay for new infrastructure but with insufficient English to rise to the oppprtunity (english language testing relaxed during Covid). Indeed, plenty of evidence that education is more about a permanent right to remain than education with an escalator between UG and PG degrees, aided by the institution. My sense is that we are past peak university, and professional apprenticeships are growing in popularity. Can’t happen soon enough. Between student customers and universities as profit centres the model is broken.

‘‘Left-leaning states such as California should open their own state-subsidised far-Left version of the Hillsdale model. What harm would that cause,”

hahahaaa, surely you do not mean that? Actually reading your article I would say you do.

DeSantis is striking at the snake – no one else is, so why single him out? Why not take on the utterly Insane Governor of Minnesota?

Back when I did a bit of off and on again University and college 15% went, I think.

13.6% of American people have an IQ between 115 – 130, and 2.4% have IQs above that…16%

University is just not really suitable with an IQ under 115, not if it is University. This has long been thought the case – and 120 really, for anything complex, and over 140 (mine) for serious stuff……

So how can 50% go to University? Only one way – it is not University.

Great essay overall, but a rapidly increasing percentage of publicly-funded university labor costs are going towards the lgbtqia+bipoc comfort bureaucracy, as well as instructors in garbage soft subjects informed by the critical social justice ideology.
These make-work positions for otherwise unemployable gender-studies and psychology grads exist partly due to the feminization of higher education and the influx of high-anxiety career women whose impulse is to treat twenty year-olds like toddlers, but also because college administrators are screamingly liberal and they actually believe that fat studies courses and bias response teams serve a purpose.
Elected officials pulling the rug out from these deluded morons is a small step towards reform at least, and should hopefully result in reduced tuition costs and some unemployed diversocrats.

Bateman, pointing out that there is another separate problem does not mean the first one goes away or becomes irrelevant.

In the UK the universities largely exist to indoctrinate young people with the values of a ‘cognitive’ elite that no longer produces anything much but which continues to monopolise the country’s wealth through its control of the media and institutions.

The consequence is that too many businesses and institutions employ too many people whose roles have little to do with their central mission.

The single most constructive policy that any government could adopt would be to close most of them and convert most of the remainder into trade schools along German lines.

I said it at the time: Blair’s target of getting 50% of school-leavers into University was simply a cunning way to warehouse the unemployed.

Totally agree with the author. The university system has utterly failed its students and society. It almost needs to be burned to the ground. I think he might be a bit harsh on DeSantis, who is at least trying to do something.

One issue that he doesn’t explore is the perception that everyone needs a university degree. The vast majority of students should be doing something else – anything else.

“…DeSantis’s battle for ideological control of curricula…”
This phrase ignores the fact that hostile, toxic, and dishonest political activists have ALREADY seized “ideological control of curricula” and are using it to aggressively undermine the United States and Western Civilization in general, and that DeSantis is working to bring these institutions back to a normal state.

We park the kids in education for an extra three to five years, keeping them away from real work, stuffing them up with debts, with the result that we’re now having to extend retirement age – by about three to five years, because there’s not enough money saved up.

Florida State schools are among the most affordable in the nation. Those commuters are paying about $5k a year, not bad, considering similar schools in other states charge close to $20k a year for the same mediocre education. Strange to choose Florida for this article

While the realignment at New College has garnered quite a bit of press there is a significant change at the University of Florida which has recently hired Ben Sasse as President. Sasse wrote an interesting piece in The Atlantic last year on How to Fix American Higher Ed. I suspect there will be long term changes changes at UF under Sasse’s leadership and these will likely not be headline grabbing but should result in profound changes at UF and could be a model for other institutions.

It’s not either/or. I’m in North America and there is a massive ideological problem on campus which is now seriously undermining STEM – not least by diverting hundreds of millions, probably billions, of dollars in a time of austerity. But yes HE is twice the size it should be; more emphasis should be a small, local, community-based artisanal high tech craft colleges and apprenticeships – as I sketched here for the SDP blog https://sdp.org.uk/sdptalk/a-localist-model-for-higher-education/

“Instead of kvetching about CRT and bathroom access, our governors ought to be completely restructuring the country’s lower-tier state universities”
False dichotomy. The author’s suggestions are good ones, but content matters too. DeSantis is starting with content, perhaps because that’s more doable. Besides, a school that teaches something legitimate might be easier to reform structurally. IOW, make the schools worth saving, and then save them.

Well who would have thought it that academics could be so corrupt as to perpetuate a system which is downright dishonest in its aims objectives and outcomes. And I though lawyers were bad but then they have now been supplanted by the media.

Stanford now has more than 10,000 administrators who oversee the 7,761 undergraduate and 9,565 graduate students—almost enough for each student to have their own personal butler. (There are about 2,290 faculty members.) These bureaucrats make up an increasingly powerful segment of the university population, as they expand their portfolio and send the message that all conflict should be adjudicated by them.
There’s the problem. Bureaucracy has been ballooning with social justice warriors of all stripes who need to find problems to justify their positions.
We need to figure out how to get rid of these busybodies. Perhaps removing tax exempt status from schools with greater than a 1:5 ratio of bureaucrats to students, or something.
https://open.substack.com/pub/bariweiss/p/stanfords-war-against-its-own-students?r=gac4u&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

DeSantis is trying to free colleges (in this case, one small school in Florida) from the racist DEI and CRT agendas. As a Florida resident taxpayer, I do not want my money funding such ugliness.
To you overall point about the cost, well, it became a lucrative industry when government took over student loans. When I went to college, my dad and I went to a bank, applied for a loan with a ten-year repayment plan, which he co-signed, and I paid the bank back in less than five years after leaving. Get the government out of the student loan business and you’ll have far fewer worthless “studies” majors, fewer worthless administrators, and more people finding work in useful trades and professions. (I was one of those low-paid adjuncts, but I’m very proud to say that most of graduating seniors I taught went on to be very successful in their field – commercial art!).

There are two problems with higher ed: 1) Universities and colleges are failing to teach anything useful to 70% of their students. 2) Instead they have turned to indoctrinating students with actual lies (gender theory, queer theory, CRT, inster-sectionalism).
DeSantis and other Governors are tackling issue 2). You have top stop the bleeding and root out all the unqualified admins and bureuacrats that administer this stuff before you can tackle 1). That’s a long road, and will probably require the collapse of many schools and systems. Stopping the indoctrination is a good first step in the meantime.

UK universities are in a similar state. My solution is to make universities, rather than the taxpayer, responsible for providing and recovering student loans. That should incentivise them to turn out employable graduates.

Attack DeSantis with an empty swipe, and totally ignore why/how the state college systems expanded remedial education. Is Unherd losing it’s edge, this is a boring long winded essay.

If you appeared on NPR and wrote for the Atlantic then you are a major part of the problem No and’s if’s or but’s.

The fact that Ron desantis talks with such a degree of sense and rationality this really annoys the so called “left”. The problem is the left and liberal anymore they have gone so far now they are like dictators who simply cannot see reason in anything! Universities seems to teach socialist propaganda feeding into democrat far left leaning ideologies, as they will push for some sort of Chinese regime and be supported by these so called students. The hardworking manual jobs that USA was so well known for created strong moral family based values, academia has created jobs with no purpose, and therefore society has been completely eroded. Hard work and sacrifice for the common good creates strong society, USA has outsourced all of these hardworking jobs and in-turn weakened the fabric of their society so they no be highly manipulated whilst fighting on supposedly progressive issues with no answers, like Gender! What a mess, only hardship and horrendous times will allow society to restart and rebuild!

I was dismayed to learn that my college in Oxford is remodeling its student accommodation so as to provide en suite bathrooms for every student room. Apparently it’s what the consumers demand. It’s just wrong.

Look at the statistics on US tuition fees- scandalously outstripping inflation.

Many of the author’s criticisms of higher education generally are spot-on. There are simply not enough white collar jobs for college graduates to justify the ‘put everyone in college’ approach currently favored by academia and government. Academia, from researchers to administrators all the way down to professors, has a clear and obvious economic self-interest in this approach. The motives of government, however, depending on where one falls on the sliding scale of cynicism toward humanity generally and government specifically, largely fall into some combination of misguided idealism and base indoctrination. My opinion falls nearer the latter, which brings us to Ron DeSantis, whose name is gratuitously dropped in the subtitle then largely forgotten by the actual substance of the article. The specific example of Ron DeSantis reorganizing this one university, along with the other examples cited, is only tangentially related to the author’s topic or higher education at all. It is a political tactic used for political ends and it is by no means new or unique. It is better understood as a woefully belated attempt to counter what others in government have been doing for most of my lifetime, that is leverage governmental authority to push academia towards certain political alignments and indoctrinate youth into particular ideologies. Whether or not colleges and universities should be used like a political football is at this point, pardon the pun, academic. One can hardly blame the other team for taking the field and playing a bit of defense, however belatedly. What’s good for the goose after all. None of that, however, is really all that relevant to the author’s actual point, and he does make a good point. In short, this is a decent article that would have been better served by sticking to the topic and avoiding any political name dropping lest he appear to be engaging in obvious bait and switch tactics.

Very good points made in this piece. Yes, DeSantis may be going a bit overboard for political reasons as the author suggests. However, much of the blame for our current “higher education” crisis is the Democrat approach to sanctimoniously throw gobs of taxpayer funded money into the existing system year after year.

An interesting article that makes some good points about waste and aimless credentialism undermining education. I believe that what de Santis is doing is the wrong way to go about tackling what is a genuine problem: the capture of educational institutions by a narrow ideology. It is wrong because it sets a precedent of government interfering in educational curricula that will no doubt be used by the other ‘side’ to justify as escalation in furthering its own agendas by imposing them on the education system.
I believe that a better approach would be to allow higher education institutions freedom in what they teach, while setting standards in how it is taught to ensure that this meets basic standards of competence and fairness. At the same time, state funding of higher education should be primarily delivered in the form of a ‘voucher’ system, so that students take their funding with them, rather than the institution being directly funded. Doing this would mean that students can ‘vote with their feet’ and leave institutions that are delivering education that doesn’t match their values. It would also be necessary for government to legislate that professional membership bodies can only base their accreditation of training on whether the course is professionally delivered and includes core subject content, not on its ideological position/s. Like free speech, education requires autonomy and freedom to truly flourish and act as a safeguard against totalitarianism, and this means that the state must not try to silence those whose beliefs it dislikes, but rather promote a culture that values learning and developing the critical thinking that will allow students to see through one-sided ideologies.
To the author’s broader thesis, there is clearly a necessity for some level of public funding for higher education, but a level that is targeted far more carefully than is done now. In particular, there needs to be a move away from credentialism, the tendency to require ever higher and longer-lasting degrees for professional training. This leads to bloating of the educational sector, unnecessarily large student debts and among some professions is used as an unfair form of ‘gatekeeping’ to keep their numbers small and elite. Many professions that formerly had a more apprenticeship-like training format could likely work just as well through operating under this structure again, or at least a format that places a higher weight on skill development and unnecessary amounts of theory (of course theory is important, but it’s about getting the right. balance).

Just keep the background in perspective: humanities enrollments are dropping precipitously, and DeSantis’ polling numbers are dropping. While the US is engaged in noisy culture wars STEM is saved by foreign and immigrant students. Just look at the percentage of Indians in silicon valley.

Interesting New Yorker piece on Rufo linked (per Chris Rufo) in the article, particularly Crenshaw’s comments.
Rufo’s opprobrium is directed at what he considers ideological capture of academic depts by political activists intent on promoting an identity marxist ideology under the guise of scholarship.
Rufo’s sub stack article on his motivation and reasoning, is worth a read, as is James Lindsay’s rigorous description of the Critical Race Theory (see Lindsay’s analysis in his book Race Marxism) of Kendi, DiAngelo and Crenshaw et al.
https://rufo.substack.com/p/shut-down-activist-academic-departments?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1248321&post_id=108402492&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
and
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical-race-theory/

The fact that Oliver Bateman believes that his history students were watching Breaking Bad during his lectures because some private entity was stealing their money tells you everything you need to know about him as a teacher, journalist, and logician. When he name-drops about “writing in The Atlantic and going on National Public Radio,” he thinks that lends credibility to his mangled reasoning instead of yoking him to the most popular purveyors of mangled reasoning. Oliver Bateman is a master at his craft.