The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: America's Universities Are In Crisis

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

"Universities are now competing for students rather than students competing to get into universities." — Victor Davis Hanson American universities are facing a growing crisis. Enrollment is falling, tuition continues to rise, student debt has reached record levels, and public confidence in higher education is declining.Victor Davis Hanson explains why on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words”  👉Go to JoinADF.com/HANSON or Text HANSON to 83848 to help support Alliance Defending Freedom’s work!HTTPS://WWW.JOINADF.COM/HANSON.COM   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson. There's been a lot of news lately about the university's higher education in crisis. And the universities are now competing for students rather than students competing with each other to get into universities. Maybe the elite universities still because of their brand name, although they've suffered a great deal on their admissions reflect that and their applications are down, they'll always make it, seven or eight so-called top tier. But most four-year colleges and universities are in a bad straight. And why is that? First of all, it's demography. During the 1960s, the fertility rate reached in 1960 about 3.6 children per family.

It's recovered a little bit the last three years, but it's 1.7. So the cohort of 17, 18-year-old, 19-year-olds is only about, it's less than half. half. So they are competing for a much smaller pool of young people. The second thing that's really turned people off is the tuition has increased the last 50 years three times, three times more than the annual rate of inflation. Now, why is that? Mostly it is because of administrative bloat. Where I work at Stanford University, the Wall Street Journal now recently suggested that if you count graduate and undergraduates at Stanford and you count administrators and their staff, there is roughly one administrator or staffer for every student. This is because the university

became in local parentes. It said, I am a parent, and I'm going to monitor the 360-degree 24-7 life of a student. If he's not happy, we're going to deal with it. If somebody accuses you of sexual harassment. We're going to deal. We're going to deal with everything. And we're going to try to also be political. Our job is not disinterested inductive education. It is to turn out left-wing people who can offer an antithesis to the family, nuclear family, the community, the religion, etc. We believe society is biased with corporations and family and religion, and we're going to offer a antithesis. That turned off people, believe. me. Professors themselves are unique in American life. Nobody else has the same conditions of

employment. After six years, they get tenure. Outside the exclusive schools, it's almost automatic where I worked at the CSU. I think 90% of assistant professors got tenure. Release time is very common now that you can say, I want to be a part-time administrator, or I am tutoring, or I have a special project and you can get a reduced teaching load. Remember that the teaching load has gone way down. In most colleges, it's between two and four courses a year, a year. Maybe not the CSU, but even CSU has gone down on many campuses from, that's the California State University System, the largest in the world, from four classes to three classes

a semester. And part of the way that they finesse that was when you increase the administrative budget and you increase the release time for full-time faculty and decrease the teaching, you hire part-time temporary lecturers and you exploit them. You pay them about 40% per class what you would pay a full or associate professor. You don't really give them the same type of benefits. and at some universities, the number of courses, the percentage of courses that are taught by part-time exploited lectures is getting up to 40 and even 45%. Another thing that turned the public off about these universities, they grant gouge.

We're starting to learn that, say, on NIH grants, many of these universities were charging not 10 or 15% commission, but 40%, and even higher. In other words, if a professor got a million-dollar grant from the federal government, a university would step in and said, well, you're using your office or your phone or your lab. We want 40% of it. And they use that because the whole system is financially unsound, financially unsound, largely because, again, of administrative bloat and the creation of centers and programs that have nothing to do with education. but form a huge overhead. Another thing that got people very worried is another way they finance this debt, expanded their administrators, cut back on teaching, was they brought in over a million foreign students.

And unlike American students, there are no scholarships. There are no discounts. Foreign students pay the premium, if not a little bit higher rate of inflation. Now, the problem with that of tuition, The problem with that is when you bring in 300,000 students from China or over 200,000s from the illiberal Middle East, and when you look at the origin of most of these students, they are from autocratic and illiberal places in Africa, Asia, the Western Hemisphere, particularly the Middle East and China. then you start to politicize the student body. And you can see what it happened after October 7th.

We had enormous demonstrations often led by foreign students, chanting from the river to the sea. Palestine will be free. That's essentially code for destroying the state of Israel. And we had violent demonstrations, often led by people from the Middle East. And, of course, the FBI suggests one to five percent of Chinese students are actively engaged in espionage. The public knows this, and they're not fond of that idea, that sometimes their children don't get into school because the universities are letting in foreign students because they pay a premium. DEI did damage, diversity, equity, inclusion, the idea that the universities, despite state referenda and Supreme Court decisions, the civil rights,

acts, they were deliberately, consciously, insidiously, using race as a barometer to admit people, to hire people, to retain people, to promote people on the basis of their superficial appearance, their sexual orientation, or their gender. It was entirely anti-merocratic. It was like the Soviet commissor system. It was like the McCarthy period. If you wanted to get a job at a university, you had to fill out, in most cases, a diversity statement. And believe me, if you wrote on that diversity statement, honestly, I believe that DEI is anti-mericratic, you were not going to be hired. There's another reason that these universities are in crisis. The federal government came in and guaranteed student loans. Once they did that, the universities jacked up the rate of tuition,

as I said, three times higher on an annual basis than the inflation rate. So the government came in and said, you guys can loan students money and we will back it up. So they will pay you back with federally guaranteed dollars. And we know now that there's a 30 to 35% noncompliance rate, that people are either late or have defaulted. And so when you have $1.7 trillion in debt, and you see that the debt is increasing because the students are not graduating in four years,

the average graduation now is six years, about 30 to 40% of people who enter college do not ever graduate, but the whole thing is subsidized by loans from banks that are guaranteed by the federal government, and that gave a green light for universities to offer these crazy courses that nobody wants, peace studies, race studies, black studies, environmental studies, except the dash studies, studies, because the students took it and the government paid for it. And nobody worried about whether they graduated or whether the employer's found a well-educated and empirical product coming out with a BA.

Finally, we're short a couple of million plumbers, electricians, blue-collar, carpenters, sheet rockers, roofers, these are very important to the economy of the United States. But when these universities said, come to us, and maybe even if you don't graduate, 40% of you or if those who do average six years, and even though you're going to run up a big debt, you can take psych and sociologists. It's a good time to kind of float around, live in your basement, have a good time in your 20s. But the economy answered back, we're wasting kids formative years in the 20s. We need master electrician. We need oil workers. We need skilled carpenters. And the irony is if you graduate with a bachelor's degree in psychology or sociology versus you are a master electrician at the age of 22, the electrician these days is going to be making $100,000 plus.

And the sociology BA or the person with, I don't know, two or three years of psychology is either going to be unemployed or not using that education at all in his employment. or if he is hired, he will be making half of what the electrician or the whifford or the carpenter makes. Add it all up and the universities are in bad shape and they're in desperate need of coerced reform because they will not reform on their own. Thank you very much, Victor Davis-Hanson for the Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. And also check out my own website site at Victorhansson.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.

For 250 years, America has been a bastion of freedom. As we look ahead to the next 250, we're reminded that freedom is ours to defend. Today, Alliance defending freedom stands in courtrooms across the country to protect those freedoms we cherish, life, free speech, religious freedom, parental rights. These freedoms are at the core of who we are as a nation and they must be preserved. ADF is approaching a critical fiscal year-end fundraising deadline. Your support today helps ADF defend these freedoms so they may endure for many years to come. Every dollar you give will be doubled thanks to a special matching grant while funds last. Visit join ADF.com slash Hanson or text Hansen to 838 to give today. That's Join ADF.com.com slash Hanson or text Hanson to 838 to give today.

That's join ADF.com slash Hanson or text Hanson to 838848.