That's historical revisionism. The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.

Most of the world has severed the two. A lot of what you'd consider key parts of the university experience just doesn't exist in most of Europe or the highly developed parts of Asia. In practice, it's attaching job training to a very, very expensive resort, regardless of who is paying for it. It's pretty nice, in the very same sense that spending 4 years in a beach resort ls also great, but one needs to be absurdly wealthy to choose this model if an equivalent was available without all the features that most of the world has abandoned. The US system would already have been in trouble years ago if it didn't have a government license for being the safest, more reliable way to immigrate into the US. Get rid of the F1 practical training to work visa pipeline, and see many US institutions in serious economic trouble. We can keep trying to keep it working as-is by pushing other people's money into the expensive vacation environment, but without major subsidies, we are already seeing more people realize that the risks are way too high when you have to get loans to attend. There is no idealism separate from economic incentive in institutions that charge 60K per year, plus often a whole lot more for mandatory on-campus housing, without financial aid.

But as it's normal with failing institutions, they'll be extended, kicking and screaming, until they completely collapse instead of reform, like almost every other country in the world already has.

It's not sustainable to sell a product that most people only buy because they were trying to buy something else (or because they're forced to for societal reasons).

That sort of approach is exactly why "Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost" (as the title states)! People are wising up to the truth, and now it's harming the credibility of the system as a whole.

It's an interesting combo, but after working for a decade in higher ed, there is a real division and enmity between the liberal arts and sciences and the "career" programs. The latter is seen as an illegitimate degree mill. The former as a freeloader that does not pull its weight financially. It is an uneasy partnership of convenience.

This comment would make more sense if more than ~38% of the country had a college degree. Can you really make the argument that college is truly a middle class concept if not even half of the populations has a bachelor's degree? I guess if you include community college which has really helped to serve the downtrodden get on their dream paths then I guess it makes more sense?

What they crank out today suffers from grade inflation. No longer is 'C' the average grade. Kids and parents who pay over 100k for their diploma all demand above average grades. It's not as bad as presenting a diploma from a Caribbean diploma mill, but they're not what they used to be.

Academic freedom? Where has that existed in the last 20 years?

That's a very ideological take, especially this part:

> It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well

Most people are now saying in polls it didn't serve them well! You're disagreeing with the majority of people's lived experiences. And of those who say it was worth it, a lot will be people in denial. Nobody wants to rack up huge debts and then admit it was a mistake. If you were to somehow measure how many people it has actually served poorly, instead of whether people admit it served them poorly, the numbers would be worse.

And serving democracy? No way! The Biden presidency stressed democracy by illegally attempting to bail liberal arts majors out of their debts, an extreme violation of the social contract. And arguing this stuff served people well when they're telling you right out that it didn't, is the kind of anti-democratic attitude that liberal arts colleges incubate in their student body. It's a big reason they're now openly loathed by so many people.

A good example of the problem is when you claim the academy has "some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive". There is no "separate from economic incentive". Anywhere, ever. For an adult to have such a belief is like still believing Santa Claus is real. It's economic incentives that have led to these professors creating a flood of non-replicable research using unscientific methods. Publish more papers = get promoted, even if the claims are false. So they publish lots of false papers. Incentives = outcomes, always.

Professors brainwashing people at vulnerable stages of their lives into believing false things about human nature is the number one reason why politics is so polarized, why democracy is so stressed all the time and it's so difficult to get anything done. It can easily take decades for people to learn that it isn't true and sometimes they never learn at all (like, because they went into academia themselves).