If colleges and universities are to compete, they will need to adapt. But they have become bastions of bureaucracy often beholden to donors and state governments, and are therefore unlikely to do so. Even if they did, such adaptation would require continuing to abandon less-profitable areas of scholarship such as the humanities and social sciences, areas once considered synonymous with “higher education.”
That means an even greater focus on business, legal, and research programs that ensure profitability, morphing America’s great educational institutions into little more than white-collar versions of the trade school model. That will truly be the death knell for American higher education as we have come to know it. American colleges and universities may well continue to exist in some form, but they will no longer be the epicenters of broad knowledge that rightly defined them—a demise that, at least in part, is of their own making.
The hallowed halls of America’s once-great education institutions have become little more than intellectually hollow echo chambers, grand structures that serve little purpose outside the parroting of platitudes from romantic yet impractical philosophies that, despite their repeated historical failures, simply will not die. The sober majority has taken notice, and the free market is responding in kind. Soon America’s ivory tower will be just another rubbled ruin proclaiming its past greatness.