Just a few years back, most Americans were in the grip of the great delusion that a college degree was the path to future prosperity. College degrees were necessary, and the more prestigious the institution you attended, the better off you’d be. Dissenters were scoffed at as “anti-education” misfits.

That delusion is dissipating, as it has become evident that, for a great many students, college does little or nothing to improve their productivity. And whereas employers used to believe that college grads were on the whole smarter and more trainable, many of them now see college as a malign source of bad attitudes and habits.

In this American Institute for Economic Research article, Walter Donway looks at the reality of college. He writes, “Even as it became the default path for men and women alike, college became increasingly administratively bloated, unabashedly ideological with confusing options of increasingly less value after college, and, for many, shockingly expensive.”

Before the federal government got involved with higher education, college was not very expensive, and coursework was concentrated on actual knowledge, taught with demanding academic standards. But that has changed dramatically.

Donway continues,

The ideological agenda of higher education has resulted in conversion of much of the core curriculum to postmodernist ideology, loosely termed “political correctness” and Neo-Marxism. Liberal arts programs have been shedding classical disciplines — logic, rhetoric, moral philosophy, history — for courses focused on identity politics, power structures, and postmodernist/Marxist critiques of Western (especially American) history, economies (that is, capitalism), society, politics, and the arts. While there are admittedly jobs for well-trained, committed cadres of postmodernist activism, the classes offer no preparation for most real jobs.

It was never true that college caused students to be successful. Most of those who enrolled were top-notch and would have been successful anyway. When colleges became flooded with academically weak and disengaged kids who mostly wanted to have fun, things changed. A degree was not a “great investment,” as so loudly proclaimed, but instead a big waste of time and money.

And, as Donway observes, some formerly big supporters of higher ed are pulling their money. If the college bubble hasn’t burst, it’s obviously deflating.