When I was contemplating colleges many moons ago, I told my British mother (whose family came from working-class, miner/factory-worker stock and was raised hard-core Labour/Socialist, but jettisoned it when she took a job at a newspaper in the 1950′s and saw the phoniness/intellectual bankruptcy of the left), “Wouldn’t it be great for me to go to Oxford?” She said it was “a hotbed of Marxism” and that the way colleges were, it didn’t really matter where you went, as long as you got a degree and got decent grades. I pooh-poohed that as out-of-touch hyperbole at the time (as you know, all 17-18 year olds know everything).

I wound up getting my degree in Computer Science at a satellite campus of one of the state colleges, working almost full-time during the day and taking classes at night. It wasn’t that great a school, and I feel I did miss out on some of the social aspects of college life, and some of the more broader classes I could have taken. On the other hand, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen she’s dead right. I think the Ivy League colleges, much like other American institutions who have sold out excellence for leftist dogma and political correctness (Hollywood? New York Times?), are coasting on their reputations. I think, as with the MSM, people are seeing that high-ticket educations aren’t what they used to be, and are putting less credence in them.

Kids are graduating with massive debt burdens that will take them at least a decade to pay off, and that’s if you get a decent job from studying something useful. There’s no way that I’d underwrite a “Studies” major (Gender, Women’s, Racial, African-American, etc.) as a parent. This has to be a bubble that’s going to burst.

No surprise then, that the “progressives” want to make higher education an entitlement; in a sense, having an academia bailout.