CounterCurrent: Week of 01/20/25
America’s colleges and universities are going the way of Myspace and Blockbuster. A demographic cliff has led to shrinking demand, while a growing disgust for what higher education offers props up alternatives to college. Anti-Semitism is rendering the business of college into an overpriced hate-fest, and customers are rightfully fleeing. Enrollment is collapsing. Universities need future funding, but donors are turning away. College alumni, such as those at UCLA, are withholding millions in donations over the handling of pro-Palestinian protests. The financial pain is mounting, but stopping higher education from credentialing Jew-haters and funneling them into the workplace means making the pain matter.
American higher education is reaching a historical turning point. The rapidly approaching enrollment cliff is coming amid a growing disenchantment with higher education among America’s electorate and workers. The cost of a college degree itself makes twenty-nine percent of Americans view higher education as a financial waste. Less than a quarter of Americans view a degree as worthwhile if attending requires student loans.
Cost is not the only deterrent. Colleges produce graduates who are functionally illiterate in civic knowledge. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni released a report finding that only a quarter of U.S. college students know that the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. According to a 2020 study of Millennials and Generation Z, sixty-three percent of Americans were unaware that Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews. Worse, twenty percent of younger Americans in New York held Jews to be responsible for it. This is not organic ignorance but learned stupidity. For the country's trajectory, this is not only dangerous but also an opportunity. As bad as those numbers are, two-thirds of American college students have no antipathy to Jews or Israel.
The pro-Palestinian protests that have become common features of college quads since the October 7 attacks have created both chaos for Jewish students and a financial backlash. After the Hamas attacks, gifts to Harvard’s endowment fell by $200 million in 2023. At the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), one donor withheld $5 million alone. A second UPenn donor withheld $100 million after former university president Elizabeth McGill’s disastrous testimony to Congress. Another single donor gave $260 million to an Israeli university in protest of Columbia University’s tolerance of anti-Semitism on campus. UCLA lost at least one multi-million dollar donor, which was revealed this month.
These withholdings sting. However, due to government grants and endowments, the institutions that are the targets of the donors’ ire are likely to survive. These donations withheld from universities over their coddling of the nation’s up-and-coming anti-Semites are only the ones making headlines. For anger to make a change, donors must build.
Withheld contributions to Harvard, Columbia, and UPenn amount to roughly $560 million. In perspective, the United States recently sent $500 million in weapons to Ukraine. The U.S. Department of Agriculture spent $500 million to expand meat and poultry processing in 2021. The pharmaceutical company Eli Lily recently received $500 million to expedite drug creation. These are payments to fight Russian occupation, fix supply chains, and cure disease. The magic number of $500 million is enough to begin anew. The at least $560 million withheld from America’s most erudite anti-Semites is more than enough to start a new institution of learning.
Americans no longer trust higher education because of its cost and quality. The market for higher education is shrinking, but it will not die. America needs quality doctors knowledgeable in cutting-edge science, just as it needs attorneys with above-average literacy in civics and the Constitution. Skilled trades, which traditionally do not require a college degree, have grown in demand alongside the country’s need for plumbers, welders, and electricians. Generation Z's “tool belt generation” will still need business skills if they want to grow from a single worker to a company. Beneath the need for skills, a civilization cannot exist without an education system that replicates its best values and history. The Western tradition needs to be included in degree programs if the country’s educated are going to understand the foundations of civic life. For a college student of today seeking any of these in a university, the options are costly, and the possibilities are slim.
Depriving higher education’s anti-Semitism of financial oxygen is necessary, but the problem is not anti-Semitism alone. America’s universities have created a new anti-Semitism with a veneer of legitimacy thanks to a combination of college letterheads and nonsensical social theories. Today’s college anti-Semitism is a toxic product, but the product is still needed without the toxin. Defunding campus anti-Semitism for good means funding the alternative.
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