Higher Ed on the Hot Seat

The rebellion of Americans against many liberal status quo processes and policies established over the past 50 years, strongly reflected in the 2024 presidential election results, could continue in 2025 and beyond, targeting perceptions of corruption at the nation’s universities and colleges – particularly the “elite” ones. Many seeds were sown in 2024 for a reckoning of institutions of higher education, including public ones, on many of the following hot issues:

Admissions

Many of the cases of perceived college corruption involve admissions processes. 2024 saw the conviction and punishment including imprisonment of college recruiters to some of the top private universities in the nation. Parents of potential students paid recruiters with deep ties to favored school officials thousands of dollars to slip some students into elite colleges like Georgetown University.  The fake testimonies of athletes excelling in sports the student never even played seemed almost unbelievable at times.

College Presidential Choices 

The fairly common practice of college presidents and other university officials giving out the few discretionary admissions they are permitted to sometimes less-than-qualified family members of their most wealthy or potential donors has come under fire. A class action lawsuit that names 17 of the nation’s most prestigious colleges argues that they “colluded to reduce the competition for prospective students and drive down the amount of financial aid they would offer, all while giving special preference to the children of wealthy donors.” The 17 schools were all part of a decades-old group with Congressional permission to devise a shared approach to awarding financial aid -- that otherwise might have violated antitrust laws. The case defendants claim, however, that this shared process violated the colleges’ Congressional exemption and tainted the entire organization. The collaborative group was consequently dissolved when the provision allowing collaboration expired a few years ago. While it makes sense that a college president would encourage a wealthy donor to consider having family members attend the school, the admissions process has to be equal for everyone.

Selection of “Minority” Students

In the past 20 years, ways to recruit and admit more students belonging to minority groups based on race, ethnic group, nationality and gender have all come under fire as reverse discrimination. Affirmative action guidelines were declared partly unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2024. Specific race-based financial aid programs have also come under fire. More nuanced questions about all of these categories are being raised. For instance, about race, should African American descendants of U.S. slaves be considered differently than racially black students from all over the world whose parents came to the States voluntarily as immigrants? Are women still considered to be a “minority” college demographic when, at most U.S. colleges, they make up around 60 percent of the student population? What about ethnic categories like Latinos and Asians, made up of people from dozens of mainly geographically close countries but who are widely different in cultural customs and educational achievements? Are they really an identifiable group? It might be said to be unconstitutional to use any discretionary admissions of any kind to make up for affirmative action placement of “minorities” preference when many are now themselves increasingly diverse.

DEI  

Using DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – principles that make everyone equal in 2024 became so controversial that its demise in corporate America, and increasingly on college campuses, became an election issue. Any use of DEI for college admissions, especially in elite colleges, will stir red flags everywhere,

Meritocracy

So, it looks as if college admissions may return to a standard of meritocracy, as determined by each academic institution. Perhaps one of the meritocracy requirements might be that every college applicant must document that they have read at least one complete book during their high school years -- so they can handle college assignments requiring them to read three or more full books every college semester. “Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books,” writes Rose Horowitch in the November issue of the Atlantic magazine in her article “Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” While admitting this is an old complaint, some professors blame the decreasing experience of reading entire books on students being urged to read and include citations from internet articles and even social media comments, rather than from books. A big problem with books for many students is a lack of ability to focus for extended periods of time (an hour?) on any one thing,” Horowitch points out. “But if their college grads can’t read or comprehend a full book, the institutions will get blamed.”

Department of Ed to be Shut Down? 

The biggest Washington DC news headlines regarding education in at least the past six months of 2024 was President-Elect Donald Trump and his entourage of advisors’ threat to “shut down, close, disband and entirely dismantle” the Department of Education. President Jimmy Carter established government-funded Education activities into a separate department in 1979; they had been part of HEW – the Health, Education and Welfare Department established at the turn of the century to have a federal presence in endeavors that the Constitution did not sanction. Of course, then the departments became increasingly their own separate behemoth of specially-funded programs accessible to schools throughout the nation that agreed to their increasingly politicized requirements, with vast growth in the bureaucracy, regulations and outreach personnel to oversee it all. Naturally, there are many duplicative programs and school administrations over-stuffed with bureaucrats who oversee the federal grants (some blame growing college tuition on the need to pay for these federal bureaucrats). There is also the concern that many of the government funded-programs support liberal programs to establish woke and critical race theory ideologies. It’s easy to say, “get rid of the Department altogether,” but the reality is unlikely. However, the Trump Administration may reduce or shrink the federal budget for exceedingly liberal programs supporting “woke”, CRT (Critical Race Theory), and DEI programs, as well as eliminate chunks of DOE personnel (already begun in 2024). Expect as well the tightening up of Title IX gender definitions and policies, as they were in the first Trump Administration.