When the Trump administration issued an executive order to slash Department of Education (ED) funding earlier this year, Democrats responded in outrage, painting an apocalyptic scenario of American life where students no longer have access to educational resources and where critical research funding would be redirected into the pockets of billionaires. As Senator Elizabeth Warren lamented back in March, the government “is telling America’s public school kids that their futures don’t matter.” Indeed, just several weeks ago, Donald Trump and his allies renewed their efforts to dismantle the ED by proposing to outsource “large pieces of the U.S. Department of Education” to other federal agencies. While I am hesitant to participate in the sort of fearmongering promoted by the left, I am wary of the Trump administration’s sustained war on the ED because, to a more passive observer, the message could not be clearer: Republicans do not care about education.
It is no secret that conservatives have been wary of higher education for at least the past decade. As of April 2024, the Democratic Party now holds a five-point advantage (51 percent vs. 46 percent) among those with a bachelor’s degree; this gap is even more evident among voters with post-graduate degrees, where Democrats hold a whopping 24-point lead (61 percent vs. 37 percent). While it is tempting to attribute this education gap to “leftist indoctrination” on college campuses—whereby college professors push a one-sided agenda to unknowing 18-year-olds who emerge from American college campuses almost irrevocably radicalized—ideological capture on college campuses does not tell the full story. After all, if conservatives merely turned their noses up to the current educational conundrum on college campuses but valued the idea of college in theory, then one might expect conservatives to leap up in defense of education bereft of any sort of ideological skew—one might even see a rise of conservatives on college campuses determined to fight ideological conformity from the inside. Instead, however, conservative messaging is consistent with a general disdain for the very idea of the university as we know it today. In the eyes of many conservatives, you don’t need college to succeed.
While it is understandable that conservatives have become disillusioned with the ideological capture of American colleges and universities—university faculty, after all, skew painfully liberal—the attack on colleges from the mainstream right is directed less at specific ideological skew but more towards the idea of the liberal arts education as a whole. In other words, conservatives seem to believe that because knowledge of the humanities, say, does not translate directly to professional success, it is by and large “useless.”
This message could not be more harmful for young people looking to acquire knowledge that will lead them into their future lives. What’s worse is that these young people—especially from the conservative side of the aisle—often look up to podcasters for life advice. Prominent conservative commentator Ben Shapiro recently put out a video, for instance, titled “Should Gen Z Go To College?” Shapiro, whose YouTube channel has over 7 million subscribers, reaches more young conservatives than perhaps any other mainstream political commentator on the right (especially since the passing of Charlie Kirk), with 18 percent of Gen Z Trump voters saying that they listen to his show on the Daily Wire. What this means is that Shapiro wields an overwhelming influence over young conservatives, many of whom routinely turn to Shapiro for life advice during his show’s Mailbag segment. While Shapiro does not completely disparage the idea of college, claiming that college can be helpful for “useful” professions such as those in “STEM fields,” he tells his viewers that college is “basically some place you go to rack up debt, drink and sleep around.” This sort of messaging to young people, many of whom are already on the fence about taking out massive loans to fund their education, is bound to draw even more conservatives away from college, convincing them that they can thrive in our society on, say, “apprenticeships,” as Shapiro suggests to his listeners. He even goes so far as to claim that many startup founders are self-educated and that one does not need to go to college to start a successful business. The data, on the other hand, tells a different story: the vast majority of successful startup founders hold college degrees, with 70 percent of U.S. startups having “at least one C-level person with an advanced degree.” While Shapiro is right in observing that holding a college degree does not necessarily translate to professional success, the network, opportunities, and resources at selective colleges no doubt account for the success of founders and other professionals all across the board. In fact, Shapiro himself—the founder of his company the Daily Wire—holds an undergraduate degree from UCLA and a JD from Harvard Law School.
Hypocrisy much?
But Shapiro is not alone in promoting the “college is bad” narrative on the right. His colleague Matt Walsh, host of “The Matt Walsh Show,” for instance, put out a video several years ago titled “Why You Shouldn’t Go to College.” Outside of the Daily Wire, Shapiro’s late ally, the legendary Charlie Kirk, published a book in 2022 called The College Scam, where he asks why Americans “spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a useless degree.” Even the conservative children’s show “The Tuttle Twins” ran an episode last year that weighed the pros and cons of college and suggested to elementary school viewers that college might not be the best option for their futures.
The result of this continued anti-education messaging is chilling. As of November 28, most Americans no longer see the value of a four-year college degree, according to a recent NBC News survey. Similarly, the New York Times reported in 2023 that “Americans are losing faith in the value of college,” citing increasing tuition costs and a perception of left-leaning bias among conservative voters. And while it is true that college tuition costs have reached new heights, rendering college unaffordable for many lower-, middle-, and even upper-middle-class American families, this conversation itself reveals a fundamental flaw in how we as a society have come to regard the very concept of college education. Many Americans now question the “value” of a college degree, suggesting that the function of college has become irrevocably bound up with the idea of return on investment (ROI) and securing a stable job. When an overwhelming number of graduates complete a four-year degree expecting a lucrative position—only to embark on a career path that does not substantially outpace that of a barista or a bus driver—it is no surprise that Americans grow skeptical of the dream they were once promised.
And therein lies the issue. We are all thinking of college incorrectly.
The purpose of college is not to train students for a specific job; it is to equip them with the broad, abstract knowledge needed to become educated citizens capable of succeeding in any career. Shapiro acknowledges as much, noting that college once aimed to cultivate good citizens before shifting in the early twentieth century toward a job-training model: “you don’t need … the general education; what you really need more is the education for an actual job.” Ironically, this shift is precisely what has fueled conservative skepticism of higher education. Thinking in practical terms, many conservatives now assume college must justify itself through direct job preparation. This mindset also explains Shapiro’s continued faith in pre-professional degrees: a data science major or accounting major appears to offer a clean, one-to-one pipeline from classroom to career.
The problem, however, is that the data on “who gets ahead in society” paints the exact opposite picture.
The highest earning individuals in our society disproportionately graduate from Ivy League and other top universities—universities that follow the liberal arts model and do not even offer the option to major in accounting or data science. Graduates from these schools overwhelmingly excel in finance and law, but at the undergraduate level, these students did not study finance or law as their majors—they studied economics and political science. If you enter Ohio State University (OSU) planning on pursuing a career in investment banking, you will be told by your school advisor to pursue a major in finance. Enroll at Harvard or Princeton with your sights on a career in investment banking, however, and you will be ushered into classes that teach economic theory rather than how to build discounted cash-flow models. While one might expect the OSU student to fare better in investment banking recruitment—for that student has acquired more practical, “on-the-job skills” compared to the Harvard student—it is undeniable that the Harvard student will fare better in investment banking recruitment and ultimately see a more lucrative career trajectory. Similarly, matriculate to Yale or Columbia with the goal of becoming a lawyer, and you will spend four years learning about the history of our government rather than how to write a brief or negotiate a settlement.
The rationale behind this sort of education is that the smartest, most successful people in our society are not prepared to execute particular tasks—for anyone can be taught to carry out any sort of role at any sort of entry-level job—but are instead prepared to enter our society as strong critical thinkers. This is why many of my colleagues in the English department at Columbia went on to secure lucrative jobs in law or consulting—they were not studying English literature to become prepared to talk about literature in their futures—they were studying literature to teach their brains how to think critically about the world around them. Ivy League schools do not have accounting or data science departments not because these majors aren’t useful but because the strongest professionals in these fields succeed by bearing general knowledge rather than by executing specific skills.
Matt Walsh wants us to believe that the political science major is useless, but if that were the case, then the majority of successful lawyers would not graduate with degrees in political science, economics, history, English, and psychology. The truth is that the college degree itself has absolutely nothing to do with long-term success—rather, the best predictor of long-term success is critical thinking—or what social science researchers call the “g factor” or “general intelligence”—which can only be taught (if such a thing can be “acquired” at all) through a general humanistic education—the original philosophy behind the liberal arts degree. In other words, the best way to ensure job stability is to make sure that you are as smart as possible. In theory, this should be the fundamental purpose of college—not to prepare American citizens for particular jobs but to make them generally smarter and more educated.
The reason that liberals believe in higher education while conservatives seem to have lost faith in it is that conservatives think of college in practical terms (i.e. the purpose of college is to get a job), and liberals think of college in abstract terms (i.e. the purpose of college is to gain knowledge)—and I am sorry to say that liberals are correct here. The point of college is and always has been to educate the general populace to produce better citizens of the world—students equipped to grapple with abstract ideas and turn these ideas into innovation that will benefit our society.
It is lamentable that the left has taken such a wonderful idea first proposed by Matthew Arnold—that we should all become citizens in the world versed in culture, literature, art, and society—and turned it into an ideological battleground, but it is also lamentable that conservatives, in response, have turned their noses up at the very idea of the liberal arts education that has guided the development of Western society since the Ancient Greek polis. But if we are to rescue our society from total anti-intellectualism, is it not our duty as lovers of tradition—as conservatives who wish to conserve the spirit of inquiry that built up Western society—not to barrage our higher education system with insults but to uphold it as the epitome of the dissemination of knowledge in Western civilization? After all, as Shapiro tells us, the idea of college has always been to craft better citizens in our society. While we have perhaps collectively moved away from this model, it may do us all well to recast higher education not as a vehicle through which we land that coveted job but as the bearer of “sweetness and light,” as Matthew Arnold tells us: moral righteousness and intellectual power.
If we continue to reduce education to a crude cost-benefit calculator, we will lose not only our universities but the very intellectual heritage they were built to protect. Conservatives once understood this better than anyone. It is not too late to remember.
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I agree with you, but I also worry about sending my daughter to a college where she will be faced with extreme, faculty-approved antisemitism; antizionism; gender ideology; a quasi-Marxist view of society; and contempt for her parents. She is currently only a few months old and I just hope that the situation on campus improves over the next eighteen years. My wife and I (both graduates of humanities degrees at elite universities) find ourselves asking whether we even want her to go to university in this environment, a conversation neither of us would have predicted having when we were undergraduates. We don't disagree with the idea of a university humanities education, but we worry that the current model of the university imparts extreme brain rot instead of "the best which has been thought and said."
I have some sympathy with this argument, but I can't help pointing out that it presents a picture of a long period of academic peace in which most people went to college as a matter of course. But that is not the case. College was traditionally the preserve of the rich, many of whom were there for the connections, not the education. True scholars were few, whether rich or poor. Most people did not go to college. That changed after WWII, and there was a vast college build-out program through the sixties designed to extend college education to the masses, or at least to the middle classes.
There were not, of course, enough good scholars, let alone gifted teachers, to keep up with this vast build-out of universities and vast influx of students, and so the character of university education was bound to change, as much in the character of the teachers as in the character of the students.
Aspiring professors mobbed PhD programs in much the same way people have been mobbing computer science departments for the past few decades, resulting, inevitably, in oversupply and the infamous taxi-driving PhDs. There were not nearly enough reasonable research projects for all these doctoral candidates, resulting in the glut of rightly-mocked weird disciplines and thesis topics.
There were not enough true scholars among those recruits to permit the development of any rigor or discipline in most institutions. Such rigor was a threat to jobs and so had to be eliminated, with the results we can see now. That it was the ideas of the left that subsequently came to predominate can be explained simply by the fact that people of a more rightward inclination were off building companies rather than research chairs.
There may indeed be a value in a scholarly education of at least the brightest middle-class children, but to suggest that there has ever been a stable and mature system in place to deliver it is misleading. The university system grew like a weed, which led inevitably to its current corruption, and to the disdain that people who see no value in its strange and corrupt curriculum now have for the institution as a whole.
Is it possible to develop a robust scholarly institution for the education of middle-class youth, and to do so on a scale that can include most of the middle class as well as the brightest and most motivated of the working class? Perhaps, if it is in fact possible to develop genuine scholarly interest in so wide a swath of the population, which I doubt. But the universities at the moment are arguably further from being able to do that than they were in 1945.