Colleges across the country are facing declining enrollments and gaps in funding. AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google 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.
Indeed, many universities have taken to saddling students with enormous debt while they teach garbage — lefty-agitprop “knowledge” and “skills” that bomb in the job market.
The public has noticed: 75% of Americans rated a college education “very important” in 2010, per Gallup, but just 35% last year.
That trend is underscored by the 20% spike in enrollment at two-year vocational programs since 2020 (per the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center): Those schools teach real skills for far less cost.
Parents are revolting for other reasons: Why pay through the nose to seek your kid turned into an idiot lefty?
Some 34% of students say violence is OK to silence speakers they disagree with, while 28% self-censor to avoid backlash, reports the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
And it’s worst at “top-tier” colleges like Harvard and Columbia.
No wonder, as London’s Sunday Times reports, the 16 Southeastern Conference schools saw a 91% surge in undergrads from northeastern states from 2014 to 2023: These schools have improved academically and tend to be more open-minded.
It’s adapt or die for the entire higher-ed sector: Cut administrative fat and bogus pseudo-academics so you can slash tuition, or you won’t collect enough to support that waste or your school’s truly-valuable assets.
Academia can still serve its higher ideals, but it needs to start shedding all the parasites that are killing it.
