Much is made of the cost of college tuition, but significantly less fanfare is given to what universities spend their money on to justify those costs. None of those spending priorities are more useless, or more damaging, than the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies that promote racism to young, impressionable adults.

Take a look across the landscape of college education and you will see just how many taxpayer dollars are being wasted on DEI programs. Wisconsin Republicans determined that the University of Wisconsin system spends $32 million on DEI officers, the same amount of funding that they then voted to cut. South Carolina’s Commission on Higher Education came back with an estimate of $8.3 million for the state’s public colleges and universities, though the numbers provided were “all over the map.”

But what is the practical effect of these DEI bureaucracies, aside from enriching a bunch of useless bureaucrats on the dime of taxpayers? Stanford’s DEI dean joined protesters in shouting down a judge and depriving Stanford students of the opportunity to hear him speak. Clemson University used a hate crime hoax to peddle racial division on campus. Most notably, Texas A&M has seen a marked decline in students saying they feel welcome at the university going back to 2015, as the university heavily promoted DEI programs.

DEI programs are not designed to make people feel welcomed or included. They do the opposite, telling young adults that the only thing that matters about them is their skin color, their gender, or their sexual orientation. DEI programs divide those students, tell them they are either permanently oppressed no matter what they do in life or that they are evil oppressors who must atone for their sins based on their immutable characteristics, and then send them off to the real world to peddle that toxic, divisive, dehumanizing worldview.

That is what millions upon millions in taxpayer dollars are going to at universities big and small across the country. Those DEI programs have allowed liberal bureaucrats to embed themselves in higher education and swamp young adults with an ideology all about collectivist grievances. They prepare students not for the real world, which is complex, but for the simple-minded world of progressive activism, where everyone is nothing more than a demographic on a spreadsheet who can be blamed for everything or for nothing depending on what category they fall in.