Now, students are taught to “trust their feelings” and to value “lived experience.” Classic literature and thought is denigrated as being about “dead, white men.” For more on this, I suggest “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
And so now there’s been a reckoning. This is good. The fact that this reckoning is coming from one of the great idiots ever to occupy the White House is unfortunate, but it doesn’t make the needed corrections any less positive.
And the changes aren’t just coming from hard-right populists. A couple years ago Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania eliminated the college degree requirements for 92% — or about 65,000 — of state jobs. The truth is that for the vast majority of jobs in our society a four-year degree simply isn’t necessary. And even most advanced professional jobs don’t really need it. Lawyers used to be able to read law without going to college. Lincoln did that and some say he was a pretty good lawyer.
The value of a college education has not been undermined by Donald Trump. instead, it’s been eroded by the snobbish elites who turned college into a hard-left indoctrination factory, eliminated standards of rigorous instruction and replaced reason with intuition — provided that those feelings led one to the correct hard-left ideology.