It’s change-or-die time for America’s overpriced, smugly lefty colleges
Colleges across the country are facing declining enrollments and gaps in funding. AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File
US colleges face a deadly crisis, with enrollments plummeting and budgets crashing — and they did it to themselves.
The die-back is huge: More than 130 private nonprofit colleges and universities announced closures or mergers these last five years, and (per the Huron Consulting Group) “as many as 442 of the 1,700 private nonprofit degree-granting institutions” — about one in four — “will arrive at the cusp of financial exigency” and face closure over the next decade.
Yes, one piece of the puzzle is demographic: Falling birth rates mean fewer college-age kids.
But another part is the plummeting value of a college degree, as four-year schools arrogantly hiked prices on the false assumption that they’d forever remain the only major path to success.
These schools have pushed tuition up to $100,000-a-year ranges, even as the earnings gap between college and just-high-school grads fell 28% from 2015 to 2025.
Unemployment for recent college grads, 5.7% in June, also now exceeds the overall rate, 4.1% — when it was 5.9% for grads vs. 9.3% for all workers just 15 years ago.
Millions of job postings no longer include a bachelor’s-degree requirement, including at major companies like Apple, IBM and Hilton: These companies don’t think today’s colleges teach what their workers need to know.
