At the beginning, and for at least its first two centuries, a college education was not widely desired. It was possible to achieve a comfortable middle-class standard of living without higher education: one could operate a small business and acquire social respectability without a college diploma. In small and even middle-sized towns, certain clergy were often the only residents with college experience (usually Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and Episcopalian-Anglican).
Those who went to college often did so out of a sense of duty or obligation - often to their families - or out of a sense of being called to higher intellectual pursuits - not necessarily higher income levels. While a university degree offered entrance into some professions, it was less about career training and more about igniting a life of the mind.
As the university moved toward the end of its third century and started its fourth, three shifts began to occur. The private universities began to emphasize their social status more; the large state universities began to standardize their operations and their students bodies grew significantly; the smaller four-year liberal arts colleges started to expand their appeal beyond their original denominational audiences.
While these three shifts are different from each other, they shared at least one quality: they pulled postsecondary education away from its original aims. And while each of these three shifts had its own goal, they collectively contributed to an unanticipated consequence: the advent of the consumer-driven model for higher education.
Students were no longer students. They were customers.
At first, this change in paradigm was latent. It grew to be detectable at some point between the “G.I. Bill” in the late 1940s and the materially shrinking birthrates in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Shockwaves from the latter arrived at the university in the mid-1980s.
If this reshaping of higher education was latent prior to the mid-1940s, and detectable starting in the mid-1980s, it became significant in the 1990s and thereafter.
The result, along with a anti-hierarchical youth culture, was a university mindset which worked to appeal to, and cater to, students, as scholar Tom Nichols writes:
The influx of students into America’s postsecondary schools has driven an increasing commodification of education. Students at most schools today are treated as clients, rather than as students. Younger people, barely out of high school, are pandered to both materially and intellectually, reinforcing some of the worst tendencies in students who have not yet learned the self-discipline that once was essential to the pursuit of higher education. Colleges now are marketed like multiyear vacation packages, rather than as a contract with an institution and its faculty for a course of educational study. This commodification of the college experience itself as a product is not only destroying the value of college degrees but is also undermining confidence among ordinary Americans that college means anything.
This trend has occurred in tandem with mindlessness imposed by electronic mass media, as scholar Robert Bork notes. Whether the media pressured the universities to abandon intellectual rigor, or whether the media is the result of the university’s lack of academic imagination, is an open question. In either case, the result plays into the hands of a misunderstood and misapplied concept: democracy.
The goals of a society which valued and fostered individual political liberty and personal freedom, and a society which delegated civil authority to freely-elected representatives, dissolved as the words ‘equality and equity’ were misconstrued and misused, as Bork writes:
Whichever way the causation runs, the trend in question appears to be the result of an ever more insistent egalitarianism. America never has been enthusiastic about high intellect. “Again and again, but particularly in recent years,” Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1962, “it has been noticed that intellect in America is resented as a kind of excellence, as a claim to distinction, as a challenge to egalitarianism, as a quality which almost certainly deprives a man or woman of the common touch.” He noted that anti-intellectualism “made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian.”
The university has been complicit in the miseducation. It has failed to teach that ‘equal rights’ do not imply equal innate talents or equal achievements; ‘equal opportunity’ does not entail equal financial income.
Because the university has failed to challenge its students intellectually, because it has failed to cause them to wrestle with the thorny concepts in history and philosophy, these students can believe that uniformity is justice, and that academic exploration of alternatives is bigotry.
These students later become enfranchised citizens in the nation. Universities structured on a consumer model have taught them to pursue comfort, both in the physical sense, but more influentially, in the sense that it is comfortable - i.e., it is the route of least resistance - to conform to, to cooperate with, and to promulgate the ideologies that they absorbed at college when they were not intellectually challenged. Any bits of reality which cause cognitive dissonance are perceived as uncomfortable and therefore evil.
Thus an enjoyable, student-centered college experience - with little academic rigor and little life of the mind - leads to adults who vote one way or another because it is simply comfortable.
