For a long time, conventional wisdom had it that higher education was a great boon to the country. It advanced knowledge and trained young people to think more deeply.

If that was ever true (lots of advancements in knowledge were made outside of our universities and many deep thinkers never went), it’s very questionable now. In this essay, Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds asks what college is good for.

A slice:

College grads were supposed to understand philosophy, government, literature and human nature in ways that people without such a higher education couldn’t.

They were supposed to gain a deeper appreciation of our society’s roots and purposes, and an ability to think critically, and to re-examine their views in the face of new evidence.

This is one reason for the requirement that military officers have college degrees — a requirement that probably should be rethought: Does anyone seriously believe this is what colleges and universities teach now?

Many higher ed fans claim that our spending on college has made the country wealthy. Reynolds says that the reverse is more likely the case — it’s only because the U.S. is so wealthy that we can afford to spend so much on education (“schooling” would be a better word) that delivers so little value.

Reynolds adds, “While the current brouhaha over racial discrimination, research fraud, and so on at higher education institutions is going on, we need to be preparing for a deeper national decision, on whether to spend that money elsewhere — or simply stop taking it from taxpayers and let them spend it as they wish.”

Higher ed in America has become a leftist project, taking lots of taxpayer money and funneling it into the pockets of activists who fill the heads of students with their cliches. The sooner we stop doing so, the better.