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Comment by underseacables | Hacker News Reader

Previous Gallup polling found that Democrats expressed concern about the costs, while Republicans registered concern about politics in higher education.

I think both parties are right. The cost of a university education has skyrocketed, which I believe is due to bloated administration. However, what has also occurred is a campaign of political and social indoctrination, and censorship of contrarian views.

I went to university 20 years ago, and it was common for people to challenge one another, regardless of their views, and not get punished for it. You can't seem to do that anymore, at least safely and without punishment. If you can't challenge your professors, can't challenge one another, are you learning or just being indoctrinated?

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I think the people concerned about the price of college are basing their opinions on actual contact with the educational system: they generally have kids and paying for education is a serious challenge most families face. I wonder how many of the “college is politically intolerant” opinions are based on actual student dissatisfaction, and how much of that is based on sensational news reporting? (The same news reporting that has half of America convinced that you’ll be cut down by gunfire five minutes after arriving in any American city.)

My experience from having conservative friends with kids in college is that the kids are mostly concerned with work and having a good time, and the parents are mostly concerned that their kids will develop bad thought patterns.

> I wonder how many of the “college is politically intolerant” opinions are based on actual student dissatisfaction, and how much of that is based on sensational news reporting?

Well, here are some of the findings from a 2021 FIRE report: https://reports.collegepulse.com/hubfs/2021_SpeechRankings_R...

> More than 80% of students report self-censoring their viewpoints at their colleges at least some of the time, with 21% saying they censor themselves often.

> Two in five (40%) students say they are comfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor, down 5 percentage points from last year.

> Two-thirds of students (66%) say it is acceptable to shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus, up 4 percentage points from last year.

You make a good point that news reporting tends to exaggerate the frequency of sensational events, which includes cancellations. But that's sort of how censorship and chilling effects usually work: make an example of someone who sticks his head up, and intimidate a hundred others.

> My experience from having conservative friends with kids in college is that the kids are mostly concerned with work and having a good time, and the parents are mostly concerned that their kids will develop bad thought patterns.

That doesn't mean the parents are wrong. "Eat your vegetables" and "Engage with your political opponents' views" are both healthy and possibly-unpleasant things, which it wouldn't be surprising if kids didn't appreciate the importance of.

> how much of that is based on sensational news reporting? (The same news reporting that has half of America convinced that you’ll be cut down by gunfire five minutes after arriving in any American city.)

You’re even less likely to die in a mass shooting event than a random criminal act. Do you think that people who make a big deal about mass shootings and say that it’s extremely important that we address the issue are also being driven by “sensational news reporting”?

Absolutely, yes. Especially when you consider that the definition of mass shooting changes depending on the database being used and activists in the anti-gun lobby will shift between them when its politically convenient.

https://www.policemag.com/patrol/news/15310860/half-of-surve... Half of Survey's Very Liberal Respondents Believe 1,000 or More Unarmed Black Men Killed by Police in 2019 The Washington Post database says the number was 12. The Mapping Police Violence database say the number was 27.

As a parent, my son and I are both mostly concerned with his ability to learn and that he has a good college experience.

Of the two of us, he's more concerned that I am about the indoctrination in some of his required courses. Then again, he's significantly more conservative than I am. And he's also the one who has to go through it.

> concerned that their kids will develop bad thought patterns.

lol. Is this for real? This is an adult in a democracy who needs to develop their own opinions about politics. This is so weird...

The idea that belonging to another mainstream political group is bad and prohibited for your child is just not ok at all.

Read https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-g....

In the last few years, a lot of parents have struggled with children having bad thought patterns that lead to mental health problems. Including me.

I am fine with my kids disagreeing with me politically. I encouraged them to explore the world, and encounter different ideas. I didn't realize the full extent of what they were encountering until the general mental health trends showed up in my house.

A lot of the same bad ideas that are spreading on social media, are also rampant at college campuses. My son is required to take courses that promote ideologies which both of us see as being tied to becoming suicidal and depressed.

And then people like you show up and laugh at people like me for being concerned about the ideas that our children are being indoctrinated with. Next time, do you want to be the one to pick your daughter up from a psych ward after a suicide attempt? How would you like to get a call from the FBI about the self-harm video that your child posted to TikTok?

I've had to deal with both of those things. The next time you feel tempted to laugh, put yourself in my shoes. Ask yourself what I should think of your laughter.

Have you ever spoken to a partisan before? They believe the other side is legitimately a force of evil.

Agreed. The conservative persecution complex is a real thing you see all the time. The media is biased! The justice system is biased! The education system is biased! Big pharma, the UN, social media, big tech, all biased against conservative ideas.

Convincing people that these biases are real allows conservatives to prop up their own purposely-biased alternatives. Fox News and OAN to counter the liberal media. Private Christian schools, home schooling, and for-profit schools to counter the liberal education system. Truth Social and Elon Muskification of Twitter to counter liberal big tech.

There are more than 2 sides here.

Read https://www.thefp.com/p/you-are-the-last-line-of-defense for a perspective from a liberal lesbian Jew who is concerned about censorship and current progressive ideologies. She opposes most of the alternatives that you criticize.

Admitted. That speech was given to a conservative audience. But she remains firmly liberal in the same sense that it was generally understood back when Bill Clinton was President.

Frankly, I can’t deal with the likes of Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jordan Peterson, etc, who’ve basically cashed in on their “I’m a progressive, bro!” creds to grift conservatives by telling them things they want to hear. They’ve made very successful careers out of both sidesing everything under the sun.

There’s a reason Weiss was invited to talk at a Federalist Society event here. And it’s not because the Federalist Society is open minded to progressive ideas.

I read that as you're so firmly into an us vs them mindset that you slot everyone into one of those buckets. And so anyone with a dissenting opinion becomes either an evil conservative, or a stooge of the evil conservatives.

What does a dissenting opinion look like? We've literally gotten to the point where MLK Jr's "I have a dream" speech would have gotten him kicked off of campuses for being racist. No seriously, https://pacificlegal.org/martin-luther-king-jr-would-have-fa... discusses a legal case which makes that clear.

For my part, I'll gladly stand with MLK. These days, that means I can no longer be a Democrat. I'm obviously not a Republican either, which leaves me as an Independent.

As I said, there really are more than 2 sides here.

Well, as a moderate MLK fan, let me share one of my favorite MLK quotes with you :)

"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a 'more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

Hold that thought, and consider the following.

Since the 1980s, the black-white income gap has been rising. Two contributing causes are racially biased law enforcement outcomes (particularly from the escalation of the drug war), and the abandonment of school bussing.

If you look at https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/us-criminal-justi..., you'll find that progressive states like California are generally worse than conservative states like Alabama.

When I've talked with progressives about the importance of fixing inequities in education, I've generally received excuses about how expensive and unaffordable that is. Yes, it is expensive. But because we choose not to deal with it, the ones who bear the real cost are the blacks who can least afford it. See https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/half-of-black-students-c... for more.

Democratic policies have focused on things like affirmative action, and equity in hiring.

I see affirmative action as virtue signaling tokenism. It is far cheaper to admit a few more blacks to universities than to fix schools.

I see equity in hiring as sheer cynicism. We have chosen to not fix our schools, but we can force companies to treat blacks that we failed to educate the same as whites who did learn. And then we can punish companies again for failing to promote underqualified blacks as fast as qualified whites. If we as a state taught the blacks, and offered them support services for the gaps that we left, then it would make sense to penalize companies for any difference in outcomes. I'd be happy with that outcome. But when it is the state that failed, we are shooting the messenger to penalize companies who notice that the emperor has no clothes!

The state should find ways to fix its own failures. If it did, perhaps it would realize that it's cheaper in the long run to not fail in the first place!

I could go on. For example San Francisco is currently facing the results of the BLM slogan, "Defund the police!" BLM protesters were happy to amplify any black who was willing to repeat that message. But surveys of blacks found that most DIDN'T want the police defunded! I've heard interviews from blacks who tried to say that. They reported that they were shouted down by whites.

Apparently, in the name of recognizing that black lives matter, we're supposed to only listen to blacks who say things that whites approve of?

Now bring that thought I told you to hold back, and re-read. Who sounds more like they have the shallow understanding of MLK's white moderates? Me, or progressives?

Yep there's a baffling disconnect between widespread reporting on college "intolerance" and the reality. "Coddling of the American Mind" has a lot of mindshare but cites stupendously low numbers of "attempted disinvitations" as evidence of widespread left wing intolerance among students while moving the discussion right past actual nazi groups flyering Evergreen College and sending death threats to students.

My alma mater is the University of Virginia. A wealthy conservative was so incensed by a sign saying "Fuck UVA" on a lawn dorm room that he went to campus to physically tear it down. This man was later appointed to the university Board of Visitors by the governor.

My wife is a professor at a different university. There are groups of trained reactionary students who very carefully harass some of her colleagues and friends for being trans, for teaching african american history, and for teaching climate science in ways that ride right up against the edge of legal protection. 18 year olds don't know how to do this without help.

If universities are commie monocultures, then why would these things be happening? And surely if universities were commie monocultures, we'd see the boogeyman departments like history and gender studies getting all the funding they want when what I actually see is these departments being completely unable to hire and all of the growth going to computer science programs.

I think perhaps the grandparent commentator MUST be referencing the right-wing founding of alternative universities due to their anger that their worldview doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Surely they aren't supporting the notion that universities are commie monocultures.

I don't think that's true. The quote says "Republicans registered concern about politics in higher education" and then the post says "I think both parties are right" and then describes "a campaign of political and social indoctrination, and censorship of contrarian views" in parallel construction to the left concern that the "cost of a university education has skyrocketed."

This very clearly talking about conservatives being concerned about left wing political indoctrination on campus. I think that this is blown wildly out of proportion.

"can't challenge your professors"

Seems more like nowadays it's "if you can't be challenged by your professor"

It's both.

It’s absolutely not. The balance of power has shifted toward the students in recent years (for better or worse). If a professor is able to “punish” “contrarian views,” it is only to the extent that the rest of the students get behind it.

But I also think the punished views are at most socially punished in all but outlier cases. Having worked in higher ed for a bit and then transitioned into tech, I can say that students are over quick (on both left and right) to chalk up a bad score (read: “b” when I thought I deserved an “a”) to a biased attitude toward content rather than a substantive objection to the quality of argument. One thing that is true of humans in general: we will more easily find the holes in the arguments we disagree with, and what’s more, most students have similar ish ideas (especially the “contrarian” ones), so after two years of teaching a class on (say) the history of the civil war or gender in 18th century literature, the arguments are going to be familiar enough that you can just pattern match on them.

It's more than that. And it's not just a "last 20 years thing", it probably goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, if not before.

There is a subtle selection bias going on. Like-minded people congregate together. A college professor will favor students who are agreeable to his politics, and will offer encouragement and extra effort. Those students are likely to go into academia themselves (and those who don't act as casual/amateur recruiters out in the private sector, to that university and even to the professor). Balances shift, glacially. At some point, it becomes perceptible enough that some students actively avoid those professors, programs, and universities. It's polarized (the polarization was noted decades ago, before our current mess).

The side that favors this process gives its biggest shit-eating grin, says that there is no such thing, and if there is, isn't it the other side's fault? The other side grumbles about how they're just indoctrinating kids (and you can find evidence of the grumbling going back at least through the 1960s, but picking up steam in the 1980s).

It's very real. It's not a good situation. It's not very "diverse". It leads to warped perception from both camps. One now thinks it is the champion of reason and logic, of science (and it's not). The other side grows to distrust those very same things (we'll all feel the damage from that, if it's not already happening).

And there isn't really any good fix to this.

> The other side grumbles about how they're just indoctrinating kids (and you can find evidence of the grumbling going back at least through the 1960s, but picking up steam in the 1980s).

People have been complaining about schools indoctrinating children for thousands of years. Nothing is actually new.

Socrates was sentenced to drinking hemlock for indoctrinating students.

Picking up steam in the 80s?

God and Man at Yale was published in 1951. Red Scare nonsense got lots of faculty members fired for being communist sympathizers in the 50s. Students were shot and killed by the national guard in the 60s.

The fun thing is that none of that makes claim that they weren't communist sympathizers. Saying anything about bad regarding soviet internment camps was likely to get you some very funny looks in more than a few circles well into the 80s. The people that knew about them, and knew how things were over in the USSR would literally drop down to a whisper when discussing these things at the dinner table even in private company.

Was it right to fire the professors? Debatable. Were they communist sympathizers? Most likely, considering the influence of the USCP and the money that Moscow was pumping into it. Remember, until the late 40s, or even the early 60s, Socialism, and it's final "logical conclusion" Communism was regarded as potentially sound political and economic theory by a majority of intellectuals, and most definitely Hollywood. (To be fair, Hollywood was pretty staunchly pro-soviet from the 20s onwards).

Do you believe that faculty should be fired for being communists?

Do you believe that people should be imprisoned for holding incorrect political views?

Nah. Political views can never be so dangerous that we can't wait for them to murder millions of people before we act.

I don't understand how this relates.

> are you learning or just being indoctrinated?

This is such a strange comment and is so removed from my lived experience that I question whether its even real. Where is this indoctrination happening? The vast majority of my classes were dedicated to learning the subject and there was rarely any room for deviation. Especially not deviation that turned to religion or politics. Even when discussing religious texts in my philosophy classes, it was through the lens of an academic. The same way that we discussed plato and aristotle. There was open discussion and if the conversation turned aggressive or wasn't going anywhere it was quickly shut down. We all had a curriculum to follow and certain debates can be taken anywhere or happen outside of class. If you wanted to challenge your professors, it was about your grade and that was usually done during office hours. Professors are humans and they all have their quirks but I didn't experience anything out of the norm while talking to them or hearing about their interaction with others.

As for challenging each other, I think we did more learning from each other than anything else and our opinions did change over time but that's not indoctrination, just part of growing up.

You say you went to university 20 years ago but did you end up going back afterwards? If so, what are the differences you've personally noticed?

Education is indoctrination. [0][1] It is what you sign up for when you take a course. It is trivial to reject the principles of any college course on legitimate grounds; for one thing, you can just reject the axioms. Some degree of belief is required to accept any form of human knowledge.

Maybe the problem is that indoctrination often goes beyond the scope of the course. If that is indeed happening, many would agree that it should stop.

[0] Merriam-Webster:

Indoctrinate: 1 : to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle 2 : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments : TEACH

[1] Wikipedia:

Indoctrination is the process of inculcating a person with ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or professional methodologies (see doctrine).

> which I believe is due to bloated administration

this is just a symptom not the cause. Its not like they hired a lot of admins by accident.

There must be some “law of bureaucratic empire building” that discusses the inevitable headcount bloat caused by no accountability and ever increasing budgets.

It's not that hard to see parallels between economies with near-zero interest rates and academic institutions that have an equal almost-unlimited money supply with near-zero risk (one cannot get rid of student debt in bankruptcy court).

Unchecked growth for sure.

yea exactly. Saying admin or the new gym is the root cause doesn't make sense.

They hired a lot of admins because that’s how they make money?

If you’re President heading a department of 10,000 vs a department of 5,000 it’s much easier to justify doubling your salary relative to what you were earning just a few years ago even in what has historically been a very low inflation period.

I think bloat like that just happens in successful organizations due to internal empire building. They aren't going to return that money to the investors, and aren't going to lower their prices, so that money is just there for the taking. Someone justifies it with whatever project they think helps them politically and voila.

> They hired a lot of admins because that’s how they make money?

That's nonsense.

They hired lots of admins, because they had lots of projects needing managing. They had lots of projects because they were building more buildings, bigger buildings, installing computer labs, high tech equipment, bootstrapping new schools, and a thousand other things. They had more groundskeepers, more janitors, new catering services (for all the other departments who were constantly doing things). On and on and on.

They were doing all these things to make the university look more attractive to students. Students who would choose another university, if theirs looked like the dumpy little hovel it was back in the early 1900s. Students who would take their tuition and fees with them to the other universities.

But in doing so, they were increasing the cost. But the students didn't care, someone else was paying for it, not the students themselves. Except then, the students were on the hook for it, because we slipped in student loans and took away the federal grants. (This, by the way, goes down in the history of the universe of the most evil grift ever... the students were paying for it, in the future that they were too short-sighted to see, with interest, and no bankruptcy protection.)

Yet it's still worse than this. Because those buildings and labs and fancy dorms that seem like resort hotels... those weren't paid for in cash. They were financed too. So the university is on the hook for decades to pay for this shit. And those buildings will require expensive maintenance for decades, so they're on the hook for the much-embiggened staff just to maintain them.

Not only did they bloat out the cost of education for each student that attends, they've done it in a way where they can't ever un-bloat it. For one, doing so means enrollment would drop (they're no longer the fanciest, glitziest university), but also that campus would literally fall apart and become unusable like some movie set for a post-apocalyptic thriller.

It was never greed. It was bad planning by people who think they're great at it.

Are you saying the bloated administration in a symptom of the political and social indoctrination going on in Universities? That's interesting. Can you elaborate?

Presumably they mean that universities now hire lots of 'Deans of Politically Correct Thing' whereas when I went to school 30 years ago we had basically 1 dean per college.

Yes. These administrators are not teaching classes, they are not marking papers/exams. It's not unlike the Soviet Commissariat. They exist to enforce a political ideology, not do anything productive in reality.

"which I believe is due to bloated administration."

In my state's public university system, the amount of funding provided by the state to that system per full-time equivalent student has dropped to its lowest level (in 2017 according to the source I checked) since 1995. So the state commitment to funding is lower on a per-student basis. Universities have responded by raising tuition and other costs. All of those facts mean that the real, out-of-pocket cost to students has gone up.

Looking at what information I can find on staff counts, the flagship state university data report in 1999/2000 shows a "grand total" of 10,000ish employees and a quick web search shows 13,000ish in 2023. I think we would have to slice and dice those numbers much better to see what the actual cost differences were for those two time periods.

The number of students seems to have grown to about 128% of 1999/2000 total enrollment numbers to today's total.

There is a deeper discussion to be had about the policy of funding state universities. Polls like the article show all segments of the public surveyed have declining confidence in higher education. That suggests to me that in general, people will be less inclined to have tax dollars invested into the public university system because they may see it as wasteful or not efficient.

There is some much to unpack around universities and cost . . . and, of course, private university tuition costs have exploded. Although at those types of institutions, I think many non-name-brand (or non-ivy-ish) schools have a very high "sticker" cost that maybe no students actually pay . . .

You've been out of university 20 years. Is it possible your impression of today's university experience is biased by "the media", i.e. whatever makes for the most clickbait headlines?

I also went to university 20 years ago, and don't really remember challenging professors or other classmates. You largely showed up to the huge lectures, turned in your solved problems, and took exams. The oddest experience I remember having was that we used US units in the thermodynamics class, which was a first for me (high school science was all metric). I also paid $750/semester because it was a state school and I was a resident.

I really don't understand what people think goes on at universities. Sure, some students in their personal time have controversial takes on things. The vast majority of students are just doing their coursework, though. (And things are probably different if you are going for a more liberal arts-y education instead of a state-school engineering degree.)

A lot of the complaints about cancel culture actually come from the ability to challenge one’s lecturers.

I think your view of current state of higher ed is distorted by the media you consume, and what stories make click-worthy headlines. Students challenge their professors all the time, probably more than they did 20 years ago. Just because certain news outlets and social media make sure you hear about a handful of students who had a bad time with one professor, often because they themselves were picking a fight rather than trying to have a fair conversation. But those stories have always happened. And likewise there's plenty of healthy discourse in college classrooms that you don't hear about or experience, since you aren't actually in college.

> I think both parties are right. The cost of a university education has skyrocketed, which I believe is due to bloated administration.

I think you're mistaking the how for the why. Prices raise as long as customers tolerate it, often for lack of competition — e.g. the low number of prestigious universities to land a good job. They raise costs through bloated administration, but if customers simply stopped paying, they would be forced to become more efficient and spend less on that.

In fact, giving students more options to pay tuition over time indirectly increases prices, since they become capable of paying more — hence taking more debt — than they would otherwise.

Can you say more about what you've observed around "can't challenge your professors"? My professor friends would all be delighted to be challenged more in class. (The problem they're having now, especially post-Covid, is more often lack of engagement from their students.)

And my memory of college from 30 years ago is that the debate about what we now call "cancel culture" was just as fraught; it's just that it was called something different by US conservatives back then: "political correctness".

I think the misunderstanding here is that there is no campaign of 'indoctrination' -- rather both are caused by the same phenomenon.

As universities increasingly operate like businesses, their administrations create business cultures -- stage-managed PR, no 'offense', etc.

The issue in both cases is that universities are supposed to operate outside usual market forces and be run for the sake of inquiry, to the (very long run) benefit of society.

There's a lot of irony in right wing people decrying allegedly 'left wing' campus policies which are none other than the symptom of applications of a right wing economic agenda.

Such is the irony always here with market solutions proffered by people with values: market mechanisms do not operate on values; and without regulatory floors, tend to dispense with them rapidly.

This is what has happened to universities over the last decade: the throwing away of high-risk, low-(market)-reward institutional values

I finished my masters quite recently and this has not been my experience, although I'm german. I wonder if you have real experience or if it's just what you've read/heard?

Because if you've ever taken any social science/philosophy seminars, they don't do anything else then arguing. Arguing about texts, arguing about each others opinions etc. Also arguing against the professors opinion.

I don't agree at all about the indoctrination part.

The idea to keep politics and higher education separate is laughable. You either create engineers without ANY exposure to social issues or you have politics in higher ed. Having political opinions is not doing science but trying to find scientific evidence is.

The political aspect is obviously not true relative to the past.

The post WW, Cold War era was marked by the federal government, senators and intelligence agencies literally maintaining lists of “communists” that were blackballed almost entirely.

Oppenheimer was released only recently, a movie which is all about how a tenuous communist connection led to the demise of the career of among the most famous scientists in WW2.

Students were famously killed for protests in Berkeley just a few decades ago.

And it’s only been a few decades that anyone but a white man was even allowed on campus.

The idea that speech on campus is anyways more restricted than it has been in the past is ridiculous on its face.

The idea that speech on campus is censored any more than in the past is very clearly not true. What might have changed is either the groups of people whose speech is curtailed has changed slightly, but more likely, you tend to hear a lot more about it because of social media.

In the past students were not only for free speech, but actively fought for it. By contrast older individuals tended to be less supportive of such. Now those roles have largely swapped where age is, by far, the biggest predictor of somebody's position on freedom of speech (younger = less). And so the widespread censorship on college campuses is met with relatively little opposition.

If there's a protest related to speech on college campuses now a days it's more like to be calling for more censorship, or cancelling somebody who said something perceived as offensive, rather than opposition to such behaviors. Hence one of the many reasons confidence in higher education is collapsing. In my mind higher education with censorship is teetering on being an oxymoron.

The "widespread censorship" is not widespread. The number of "attempted disinvitations" (not even actual disinvitations) is not even visible on a chart of invited speakers at college campuses across time.

There's quite an excellent poll on free speech on campuses available here. [1] And by every reasonable datum students feel that free speech on campuses is dying. For instance some 65% feel that "the climate at their school or on their campus prevents some people from saying things they believe because others might find it offensive." There's a million other interesting and informative datums in the survey as well. Notably it was also held after 2020, so we get the COVID impact as well.

[1] - https://knightfoundation.org/reports/college-student-views-o...

And now it is right wing actors getting blackballed. It is people who don't agree with gay marriage like the former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich getting ejected. The funny thing is you had discrimination against Jews on Campus a hundred years ago, and today, on entirely different premises

I agree with both, but the "indoctrination" isn't some liberal political plot for censorship. Because colleges are not educational institutions, they are investment businesses first and foremost with a side gig as a research institution that just so happens to teach people.

They're going to censor any reputationally damaging speech like any and every business in the US. It just so happens that a lot of the right-wing talking points aren't attractive to a left-leaning student body. It's all brand protection, and we see that now with a lot of colleges struggling to find a way to handle campus talks, orgs, and protests about the Israel-Palestine conflict since the public left-leaning response is not lining up with the political left-leaning response.

>The cost of a university education has skyrocketed

Citation required ... the headline prices for colleges have gone up considerably, but so has the amount of scholarship and grant funding (i.e. universities discounting from publicly advertised prices).

In fact, the average net cost-of-attendance (including tuition, fees, housing and food) for private, four-year colleges in the US is - in inflation-adjusted dollars - slightly lower now than it was in 2006-07 and has been trending down since 2016-17.

This is also the reason why annual student loan borrowing peaked in 2010-11 (again, in inflation adjusted dollars), has been reducing year-on-year, and is now down over 35% since then.

People obsess over the headline prices, which are almost never the prices actually paid. Any kind of sensible comparison has to be done on the basis of actual net cost-of-attendance.

ref. https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends%20Report%...

Where are you going to go?

Who are you going to work with?

Is there some place off Earth away from all these lessers you have to slum it with?

What puts you above the other billions on the planet that they should validate your sensibilities and engage in vacuous rhetorical debate when we can all clearly see how day to day life works?

Really tired of the puerile role play output of Karens, Special Boys, “free thinkers”. This planet and day to day is it.

You’re not that smart or saying anything that novel.

> However, what has also occurred is a campaign of political and social indoctrination, and censorship of contrarian views.

There is a world of difference between a "campaign of political and social indoctrination" and "worldview that doesn't hold up to the barest of scrutiny."

Unless you're referencing the clear bias in universities in the US founded by GOP folks upset their particular indoctrination (religious or political)doesn't stand up to scrutiny, then not that were there were an organized campaign of political and social indoctrination for leftists that academics would lead the charge to attack it and get funding to both study it and find alternatives to it.

Turns out when you encourage people to think for themselves they do.

In many US colleges you have more Registered Communists, than Registered Republicans teaching classes

Therefore, what?

Two possible options among the universe of options:

- The count of ideological voices somehow prevents minority views from publishing their views across the millions of venues?

- Could it be that Registered Republican voices are few because the worldview doesn't stand up to scrutiny?

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