He’s right. We put people in college who don’t have the intellectual capacity for university studies. It happens because state investment into higher education dropped off a cliff. So what do you do with the people, the buildings, the labs, everything? Fire everybody and bulldoze down the facilities because there is no more money for the upkeep? Nobody would make such a decision.
The only alternative is to bring to college people who aren’t capable of being college students and bully professors into passing them by declaring that failing a student is racist. DEI is a financial necessity. State funding keeps dropping, so we need more and more students who are incapable of learning at that level. Such students need a battery of professional services – tutoring, counseling, clerks to explain how life works in every area, DEI functionaries to make everybody accept what’s happening – and that necessitates more money.
Tuition grows, student debt grows, but there’s no end in sight because it’s a self-perpetuating model. And it all started when the state turned away and said, “fend for yourselves.” Yes, there’s absolutely too much higher education on every level. There’s a massive overproduction of useless PhDs, Master’s, Bachelor’s. In order to create this overproduction we are embracing unscientific, bizarre superstitions, such as that everybody is equally capable of all kinds of intellectual operations.
Clarissa's Blog 
This state gradually withdrawing from supporting public universities is not something that just mysteriously “happened”. It is a result of Americans, on average, being reluctant to treat things like higher education as a public good and preferring to look at it as an individuals’ “investment”…
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It’s happening everywhere in developed countries. This process is much more pronounced in Europe than in the US. And it’s part of the withering away of the nation-state.
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Americans are reluctant to treat higher ed. as a public good, after decades of sending their kids off to these institutions, racking up massive debt to do so, and getting negative return on investment.
The real question is: how did that happen and why?
Was that initiated *by* a state with a long-term plan of ditching colleges from its portfolio of responsibilities (just like public grade-schools)– make the schools so bad that everyone will *demand* that they be defunded– or was it a hostile takeover by ideologues, that everyone failed to notice or deal with in a timely manner? Where did it start, who was complicit, and is there anything that can be done at this late date to salvage any part of it?
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There’s this sneaky idea of “disparate impact” in the civil rights act which says any policy that has an unequal impact on different groups is by definition discriminatory and needs to be scrapped. This is the cudgel through which the state has been able to keep businesses in line and enforce its ideology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
In this landmark judgement, the supreme court ruled that it was illegal for employers to give standardized or aptitude tests to applicants, because those tests had a disparate impact on different communities (you can guess which communities fail these tests). Before this ruling, employers could hire people without college degrees as long as they could pass these tests. But now it was illegal, so a 4 year college degree became the only credentialing system through which candidates were now filtered, resulting in incentives for colleges to increase tuition indiscriminately. Also ensured a complete leftist monopoly on employment credentials.
It’s fucking insane. Name me a single social policy that has the same impact across all communities. It’s impossible.
We need to tax the fucking endowments, remove federal subsidies, and strip this poisonous provision from the civil rights act so employers can go back to screening employees without requiring them to obtain expensive degrees. These are the first steps that need to be taken to remove leftist stranglehold on higher education.
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It’s even more nuts when you look at it out in the job market: the stuff employers and employees are going through, in order to *not* administer said tests. We are basically taking smart, hardworking young men, and delaying their ability to get a good job and support a family by ten years.
The societal effects of that are not trivial.
If you’ve ever run across the “we hire veterans!” thing out in the job search world, that’s what it’s about. The military is nearly the only institution still permitted to give those tests, and lots of companies are happy to piggyback on that. They can’t give the test themselves, but they can look at your MO in the army and see that you scored well on the test they would like to have given you. So now you’ve just done 4+ years in the army and a tour in Iraqistan to prove to an employer that you scored well on the ASFAB.
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Disparate impact is everywhere. I don’t agree with hanania on many things, but his book “The Origins of Woke” is good. It traces wokeness back to the civil rights act.
“Literally any practice you can think of has a disparate impact…If everything is potentially illegal, and government does not have the resources to go after everything, then the government basically has arbitrary power to do whatever it wants under civil rights law.”
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