Education Bubble

After decades of growth, college enrollments have been falling over the past ten years. A recent AP story says that young Americans are “jaded with education” and are therefore “skipping college.”

For 17 years, I’ve been arguing that higher education is oversold in the U.S. — that because of government subsidies, far more people have been enrolling than otherwise would. Many academically disengaged individuals end up in college more for fun than for any desire for learning. If they graduate, they often wind up in jobs that they could have done while still in high school.

In March, 2021, a student at the University of Toronto found a tutor online and hired him to surreptitiously write an exam on his behalf.

In return for a $60 fee, the tutor used the student’s ID and password and joined the exam, which was being conducted online. The 90-minute test was worth 20 per cent of the grade in a first-year accounting class. The student didn’t want his stand-in just to squeeze by, though. He wanted an A. “I need at least 80+ to achieve my goal, so please make sure you have the ability to do that,” the student wrote.

Twenty-first-century America may be dominated by oligarchic elites, but arguably the biggest threat to our economic and political system might be located further down the food chain. This most dangerous class comes from the growing number of underemployed, overeducated people. They’re what has been described in Britain as the lumpenintelligensia: alienated, angry, and potentially agents of our social and political deconstruction.