As enrollment plummets, academia gets schooled about where it went wrong

Tis the season to be euphoric, or crestfallen, as young Americans receive notifications from colleges and universities of acceptance or rejection to be members of this or that institution’s Class of 2027. Never mind the spoilsport who defines college as “those magical seven years between high school and your first warehouse job.” And disregard the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s data showing that 38 percent of recent college graduates, and one-third of all college graduates, hold jobs that do not require a college degree.

But ponder this recent headline: “College Enrollment is Down — But There’s a Silver Lining.” Actually, that decline is a silver lining of the dark cloud hovering over today’s politicized, hysterical and administratively bloated academia.

Still, universities continue to churn out a supply of PhDs far exceeding the academic market’s demand for them. About 70 percent of all professors are not in tenure-track positions. Only 27 percent of those who received history PhDs in 2017 were in tenure-track jobs in 2021.

sensible people are having second thoughts. For example, the first official act of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, after taking office in January was to open 65,000 government jobs to people without a college degree. Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, North Carolina and Utah have implemented similar policies; Georgia might be next. Delta Air Lines no longer requires pilots to have a bachelor’s degree.

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