The last several months have been amazingly turbulent for higher education in the U.S. The education establishment believes its end is nigh.

Is it? In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Richard Vedder offers his analysis.

He writes:

Colleges have increasingly taken outside financial support — state-government appropriations, federal research grants, philanthropic donations — as a given, arrogantly ignoring the reality that campus behavior and articulated values are increasingly out of sync with the wishes of the taxpaying public.

And now without the support of the federal government, higher ed is in anxiety. But will it make the necessary changes?

Vedder thinks that the decline in public and federal support might have a salutary impact as market competition (and failure) exerts itself: He writes, “market forces and declining external support will squeeze colleges so much that it will force them into internal reforms that heretofore have been fiercely resisted: getting rid of DEI and other overtly racist and anti-merit campus efforts, firing huge numbers of parasitic administrators who raise costs and dilute an emphasis on the academic mission, actively encouraging the discussion and dissemination of non-leftish ideas (for example, starting campus-wide debates featuring genuinely contrasting perspectives on issues of the day), et cetera.”

Higher education has declined because of government meddling and subsidies. Ending that is the key to recovery.