These are peculiar and disorienting times for those who believe in the life of the mind. The old university systems, which were the bulwark of the postwar American boom, now seem in doubt. Fewer believe in the dream of college, especially when exorbitant tuition and housing fees ensure, in many instances, debt will follow a student until death. Incoming fire arrives from all sides. Technocratic liberals want the university to be little more than a job-trainer, delightfully pumping young blood into the STEM fields. Conservatives believe the universities are irredeemably “woke” and must be brought to heel. Unless a college is churning out a future law clerk for Samuel Alito, a conservative wonders what it’s all really for. With more Americans than ever college-educated, the value of a degree, naturally, isn’t what it was forty years ago. A college graduate is no longer so rarefied. That’s the trouble with the law of supply and demand.
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