Families across the U.S. are questioning whether a four-year degree is worth it. Student debt has soared. Recent graduates are struggling in a rapidly changing job market. Colleges can also be too ideological: On many campuses, students are exposed to a limited range of perspectives, signaling to them what rather than how to think.
This is a good opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal January 25, 2026. Suffice it to say, she acknowledges what many critics have been saying for a very long time. She admits that the whole university system in the US has been tainted and this has caused them to lose the trust of the people -- from the students to the parents sending them to college. To her credit, she does propose a few relatively commonsense solutions, including addressing the affordability factor, making the tremendous investment worth while not simply in jobs but in the product it provides, and making the university culture less political and less captive to one political ideology. Perhaps her most important idea is not radical except in the mouth of a president of an exclusive university: "emphasize equal opportunity, not equal outcomes." If this last one were to happen, it would restore a tested and proven American principal against a corrupt and impossible Woke ideology. We will see.
Dartmouth and others (even Yale) are working to replace student loans with a combination of scholarships, grants and work-study options in our financial-aid packages -- hoping to make free tuition available for families earning $175-200,000 or less. Well that should not be hard. Most of those cushy universities are sitting on billions of investments. Maybe it is time to take some of that money and put it to work for good. Universities have taken sides in the culture wars and used their influence to press their side upon faculty and students alike. It would be a welcome sign of hope if a level playing field were created for the place where learning is supposed to be free and open. Hopefully the equal opportunity vs equal outcomes debate will end such things as grade inflation and the artificial success achieved not by merit but by class. It could be the start of reform for education or it could be the signal of the end of this president's career. What will happen?
If we’re willing to reform ourselves—to listen, change and recommit to our core mission—we can again be a trusted engine of the American dream, scientific breakthroughs and the global economy.
The sad reality is that student loan debt financed the Woke agenda and the liberal and progressive bent that our university system has taken. These schools did not finance their leftward leaning ride upon the money of big donors or their well-invested endowments but upon the backs of students who thought that going to college would result in an education and a better chance in the job market. They got neither. For this betrayal to be repaired, it will take less talk and more action. At least that is my opinion.
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