VDH diagnoses the structural problems that have killed American higher education
Without exception, all of the structural flaws VDH identifies in America’s higher education were already problems when I was at Berkeley, and they explain why I hated my experience at Berkeley so much. The only difference is that, back in the day, when I attended lectures given by bored tenured professors reading off of their yellowed notes, and had my actual classes taught by underpaid teaching assistants, some of whom had only a glancing relationship with spoken English, I wasn’t burdening myself with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. I left Cal with $4,600 in debt. It was a large sum, but still proportional to what I could expect to earn with a generic liberal arts degree from a major university.
By the way, I said “killed” for a reason. Those institutions are still standing, and hundreds of thousands of kids are applying to them, but the fact is that they’re rotting corpses that no longer educate, they indoctrinate.