How Anti-Intellectualism, AI, and Academic Failure Are Destroying American Higher Education—and What It Means for Society
When universities abandon free inquiry and political leaders celebrate ignorance, societies lose more than just their colleges—they lose their capacity to solve complex problems.
Since March 2020, 64 colleges have shuttered their doors, displacing nearly 46,000 students. Federal Reserve projections suggest that in a worst-case enrollment scenario, up to 80 colleges could close, impacting over 100,000 students and 20,000 staff. But college closures are just the most visible symptom of a far deeper crisis.
Consider these converging catastrophes: AI is eliminating 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, according to industry CEOs. Two-thirds of American fourth-graders cannot read proficiently—the worst scores in over 30 years. At UC San Diego, the number of first-year students who don't meet middle school math standards grew nearly thirtyfold between 2020 and 2025, forcing the university to redesign remedial courses to cover elementary school material. Republican confidence in universities collapsed from 56% in 2015 to 20% by 2023, while Democratic confidence fell from 68% to 59%—creating a 39-point partisan chasm. Goldman Sachs projects that 6-7% of all U.S. workers will lose their jobs to AI adoption. For students in the bottom 10% academically, learning losses—the gap between where students should be and where they actually are in achievement—grew by 70% between 2022 and 2024.
American higher education faces an existential crisis unlike anything in its history. But here's what makes this crisis uniquely catastrophic: it's not one problem, it's five simultaneous disasters that amplify each other into something far worse than the sum of their parts.
First, the demographic cliff: colleges are closing at an accelerating rate as the college-age population declines 15% through 2029, with small liberal arts colleges facing extinction-level events.
Second, the value proposition collapse: even as tuition reaches unsustainable levels and student debt balloons past $1.7 trillion, colleges struggle to articulate why their degrees justify the cost when job prospects are uncertain and the skills gap widens.
Third, the AI displacement: artificial intelligence is already eliminating the white-collar jobs—junior lawyers, entry-level analysts, marketing associates—that justified expensive college degrees. Entry-level hiring in 'AI exposed jobs' has dropped 13% since large language models started proliferating. JPMorgan's managers have been told to avoid hiring people as the firm deploys AI.
Fourth, the academic collapse: K-12 educational outcomes are in freefall. High school seniors in 2024 posted historically low scores, with 45% scoring below basic in math and 32% below basic in reading. Students arrive at college functionally unprepared, forcing institutions to provide remedial education they weren't designed to offer—compounding quality issues while increasing costs.
Fifth, and perhaps most insidiously: universities have lost the trust of half of America. But—and this is crucial—they contributed heavily to their own crisis through years of ideological overreach, speech restrictions, and administrative bloat. Then political leaders responded to these legitimate failures not by demanding reform, but by modeling contempt for education itself. The result? A cultural permission structure where nearly half the population views higher education itself with suspicion.
This is the story of how universities failed their core mission, how political opportunists weaponized those failures, and how five simultaneous crises are destroying the institutional infrastructure for developing informed citizens just when we need it most. It's a story without heroes, where everyone shares blame and everyone loses.
At its heart, this isn’t just a crisis of escalating costs or eroding trust. It’s a crisis of leadership—a collective failure of courage, accountability, and vision to steward higher education and possibly America through transformation rather than decline.
The Closing: Liberal Arts Colleges Face Extinction
The numbers are stark. Between 2025 and 2029, the college-age population is projected to decline by 15%, hitting small liberal arts colleges particularly hard. Since March 2020, 64 colleges—mostly small, private liberal arts schools—have either closed or announced closures, affecting nearly 46,000 students.
A Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia model projects that in a worst-case enrollment scenario, up to 80 colleges could close, impacting over 100,000 students and 20,000 staff. This isn't speculation—it's actuarial reality. Gary Stocker, who founded College Viability to evaluate campus financial stability, estimates that 40 of the 200 struggling private colleges will close in the 2024-25 academic year, even after budget cuts.
The Value Proposition Collapse: When the Numbers Don't Add Up
Separate from demographic decline is a more fundamental problem: the economic case for college has collapsed. Nearly one-third of Americans possess little or no confidence in higher education. The most cited reasons? Colleges are too expensive, and students aren't being taught what they need to succeed.
The median cost of attending a four-year private college exceeded $60,000 per year in 2024, with many elite institutions approaching $90,000 annually. A typical bachelor's degree at a private institution now costs over $240,000. Meanwhile, outstanding student loan debt in the United States exceeds $1.7 trillion, affecting over 43 million borrowers.
Universities built luxury amenities—climbing walls, lazy rivers, gourmet dining halls—while claiming they couldn't control tuition. Administrative positions multiplied while teaching loads were pushed onto poorly paid adjuncts earning poverty wages, without benefits or job security. University presidents earned seven-figure salaries while graduate students relied on food stamps. The ratio of administrators to students ballooned, yet universities insisted they were lean operations barely scraping by.
The optics were catastrophic, and the reality was often worse. At some universities, there were more administrators than faculty members. Pennsylvania State University, for example, added more than 1,400 administrators between 2000 and 2012 while faculty numbers remained essentially flat. The proportion of the budget spent on instruction declined even as overall spending exploded. This wasn't cost disease—it was mission drift disguised as overhead.
As costs soared, the tangible benefits became harder to articulate. What exactly justifies a $300,000 investment? Particularly when graduates face uncertain job prospects, mounting debt burdens, and the growing sense that they could have learned the same material through online courses for a fraction of the price.
The Automation: AI Is Already Eliminating White-Collar Jobs
Even if students could afford college and universities could articulate value, there's a third problem: the jobs that have traditionally justified the investment are disappearing faster than anyone predicted.
Goldman Sachs estimates that 6-7% of U.S. workers could lose their jobs because of AI adoption. Stanford's Digital Economy Lab found that entry-level hiring for 'AI-exposed jobs' has already dropped by 13% since large language models began proliferating. In January 2025, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the lowest rate of job openings in professional services since 2013—a 20% year-over-year drop.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could eliminate 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years, potentially pushing unemployment to 10-20%. JPMorgan's managers have been told to avoid hiring people as the firm deploys AI across its businesses. IBM's CEO announced plans to automate 30% of non-customer-facing roles over five years.
The cruel irony: liberal arts colleges have justified their cost by promising career outcomes. But if AI eliminates junior lawyers, entry-level analysts, marketing associates, and content strategists—the very jobs liberal arts graduates have traditionally filled—what's the pitch?
The Foundation Crumbles: America's Students Can't Read
As if college closures, unsustainable costs, and job automation weren't enough, there's a fourth catastrophe: the students who do make it to college are arriving fundamentally unprepared.
Elementary and middle school students are posting historically low scores. Lower-performing fourth- and eighth-graders posted the lowest reading scores in over 30 years. In eighth-grade math, the gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students was the widest in the test's history.
But the crisis isn't limited to younger students. High school seniors—the students about to enter college—are equally unprepared. In 2024, high school seniors posted the lowest math and reading scores ever recorded on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Math scores fell 3 points since 2019, with 45% of students scoring below the basic level. Reading scores also declined 3 points, with 32% of students scoring below basic, 12 percentage points higher than in 1992.
The share of fourth-graders scoring proficient in reading fell from 35% in 2019 to 30% in 2024. There are now more fourth-graders performing below basic than there are who are proficient. More than two-thirds of American fourth-graders cannot read proficiently.
For students in the bottom 10%, learning losses—the gap between where students should be academically based on grade level and where they actually are in achievement—increased by 70% between 2022 and 2024. These aren't pandemic casualties who will bounce back. These structural failures predate COVID-19 and show no signs of reversal.
And the crisis continues into higher education. A bombshell report from UC San Diego faculty in November 2025 revealed the extent of the problem at the college level. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of first-year students whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of the entire entering cohort—despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum required math curriculum, and many with high grades.
The faculty report was stark: remedial math courses, initially designed in 2016 to address missing high school knowledge, now had to be redesigned to cover elementary and middle school material from grades 1-8. A similarly large share of students required remedial writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates. Moreover, the deficiencies are interconnected: in 2024, two out of five students with severe math deficiencies also required remedial writing instruction.
The UC San Diego report attributed the decline to several factors: the pandemic, the elimination of standardized testing (which forced universities to rely on increasingly inflated and therefore useless high school grades), and political pressure to admit more students regardless of preparation. The report exposed a hard truth: "expanding access without preserving standards risks the very idea of a higher education."
Colleges face an impossible dilemma. They're not designed to provide remedial education, yet incoming students arrive with weaker foundational skills in reading, writing, and mathematical reasoning. This means colleges must spend more time on basics rather than sophisticated analysis, compounding quality and cost issues.
The Cultural Poison: When Leaders Model Stupidity
Here's where it gets hazardous. All of these structural problems—college closures, unsustainable costs, AI automation, failing schools—are compounded exponentially by a political culture that has made anti-intellectualism a tribal identity marker.
Universities modeled ideological conformity when they should have modeled open inquiry. Political leaders modeled anti-intellectualism when they should have demanded accountability. Now we have the worst of both worlds: institutions that alienated half their potential supporters through excess, and a political culture that turned legitimate criticism into wholesale rejection of expertise. The question isn't who's more to blame—it's whether we can salvage anything before the entire system collapses.
In 2010, 58% of Republicans viewed colleges positively. By the second half of that decade, their views had flipped dramatically negative. By 2023, Republican confidence in universities had plummeted from 56% in 2015 to just 20%. Meanwhile, Democratic confidence fell from 68% in 2015 to 59% in 2023. This created a 39-point partisan chasm—not a policy disagreement, but a cultural divide.
How Universities Created Their Own Crisis
But let's be brutally honest: universities didn't just become victims of political polarization. They actively contributed to their own legitimacy crisis through years of overreach, ideological rigidity, and abandonment of their core mission.
The same institutions that proudly claim to champion free inquiry and open debate spent the 2010s and early 2020s disinviting speakers, canceling professors, and creating bureaucratic apparatuses that many viewed as ideological enforcement mechanisms rather than genuine inclusion efforts. When conservative speakers needed $600,000 security details to speak on campus, when professors were investigated for assigning controversial texts, and when students demanded 'trigger warnings' for classical literature, universities validated every criticism leveled against them.
DEI initiatives—whatever their original intentions—metastasized into administrative empires that many Americans viewed not as promoting inclusion but as enforcing ideological conformity. Diversity statements became de facto loyalty oaths. Mandatory trainings often felt less like education and more like re-education. When universities created separate graduation ceremonies by race, when they fought to maintain race-based admissions after the Supreme Court ruled against them, when they couldn't articulate clear standards for what constituted harassment versus protected speech—they handed ammunition to their critics.
Conservative media didn't invent the political correctness concerns. They were real, they were pervasive, and they fundamentally undermined universities' claims to be neutral spaces for truth-seeking. When professors admitted in surveys that they self-censored for fear of student complaints or social media mobs, when conservative students felt they couldn't express their views in class, when entire academic fields seemed to have become monocultures—these weren't paranoid fantasies. These were observable realities.
The expansion of administrative positions far outpaced student enrollment growth. Universities built luxury amenities while claiming they couldn't afford to control tuition. Presidents made seven-figure salaries while graduate students needed food stamps. As noted earlier, some universities added more than 1,400 administrators while faculty numbers remained flat. Resources that should have gone to education were diverted to bureaucracy.
So when conservatives lost faith in higher education, it wasn't just because Fox News told them to. It was because universities gave them plenty of reasons. The question isn't whether these criticisms had merit—many of them did. The question is what happens when the response to institutional overreach isn't reform but wholesale rejection of the entire enterprise.
From Criticism to Anti-Intellectualism
The tragedy is that legitimate criticism of university excesses metastasized into something far more dangerous: a wholesale rejection of expertise, education, and intellectual life itself.
Universities deserved criticism for their failures. But the response we got wasn't 'fix the universities'—it was 'burn them down' and 'don't trust anyone with a degree.' When political leaders treat expertise as elitism, when they mock education as indoctrination, when they celebrate their own lack of knowledge as authenticity—this isn't just rhetoric. It creates real consequences.
Universities modeled ideological conformity when they should have modeled open inquiry. And in response, political leaders modeled contempt for learning when they should have demanded better. Now we have the worst of both worlds.
While 59% of Democrats have some or a great deal of trust in public universities, only 20% of Republicans feel the same way. For Ivy League colleges, the gap is only slightly better: 65% of Democrats trust them, compared to just 34% of Republicans.
This matters because it creates a vicious cycle. When nearly half the electorate views education with suspicion, it becomes politically difficult to invest in educational infrastructure. It becomes harder to recruit talented people into teaching careers—who wants to enter a profession that half the country views with contempt and increasingly frames as ideological indoctrination? State legislatures controlled by Republicans—who represent voters deeply skeptical of higher education—have greater latitude to defund public universities, eliminate programs, and restructure governance.
There's a massive difference between saying 'universities need to reform their DEI policies and protect free speech' and saying 'college is for suckers and educated people are condescending elitists.' The first is constructive criticism. The second is anti-intellectualism. And when political leaders model the second while voters wanted the first, it poisons the entire discourse.
When a leader with significant influence portrays educated people as enemies of 'real Americans,' dismisses scientific consensus as conspiracy, and treats complexity as corruption—they're not just criticizing institutional failures. They're permitting millions of people to view learning itself as suspect. That's the line between holding institutions accountable and undermining the entire project of education.
The Convergence: When Multiple Crises Amplify Each Other
Now zoom out and see how these forces interact:
Students arrive at college functionally unprepared after years in failing schools, requiring remedial education in elementary-level math and high-school-level writing. Those who do graduate with massive debt burdens find that AI has already eliminated many of the entry-level jobs they were promised. Meanwhile, colleges are hemorrhaging political support—partly because they failed to live up to their own ideals of free inquiry and fiscal responsibility, partly because political opportunists turned legitimate criticism into wholesale rejection of education itself. And they're doing all of this while demographic cliffs loom and costs spiral beyond what families can afford.
Elite institutions—the Ivies, top liberal arts colleges—may survive this perfect storm. They have massive endowments, brand value, and wealthy families who view them as credentialing and networking mechanisms. But the vast middle? The regional comprehensives, the mid-tier liberal arts colleges, the schools that serve normal American families? They're in existential danger.
We might see higher education bifurcate even more sharply. Elite institutions become more valuable as mechanisms for network access. Meanwhile, hundreds of mid-tier and lower-tier colleges cease to exist. The students who once attended those schools? They'll go to community colleges, online programs, or nowhere at all.
Why This Matters (Beyond Economics)
The economic arguments are obvious. If AI handles routine cognitive work, uniquely human skills become more valuable—creativity, ethical reasoning, emotional intelligence, and cross-disciplinary synthesis. These are what liberal arts education supposedly provides. But employers won't value these skills if graduates also arrive unable to write clearly, think critically, or work independently because their education failed them.
And there's a darker scenario that should terrify anyone who cares about democracy: we might be losing the institutional infrastructure for developing informed citizens just when we need it most.
Yes, universities contributed to their own crisis through ideological overreach and mission drift. But the response—wholesale rejection of expertise and education—is more dangerous than the original problem. When political leaders model anti-intellectualism, when they treat education with contempt, when they position ignorance as authenticity—they're not fixing universities, bridging or narrowing the political divide. They're undermining the capacity of society to solve complex problems.
A population that views expertise as conspiracy and education as indoctrination can't address climate change, pandemic response, economic inequality, or technological disruption. Criticizing universities for their failures? Absolutely necessary. Convincing people that learning itself is the enemy? That's civilizational suicide.
The cruel paradox: we're losing faith in colleges just as we need them most. We're entering an age of AI-driven information environments in which distinguishing truth from manipulation will require sophisticated media literacy. We're facing global challenges that demand interdisciplinary thinking and complex problem-solving. And we're doing all of this with a generation of students who struggle with basic reading comprehension, in a country where nearly half the population has been taught to view education itself with suspicion.
The Reckoning
Some will read this and think, "Good riddance.” Colleges have become too expensive, too ideological, too disconnected from real work. Let them fail. Let market forces work. Let AI handle the jobs. Let people learn trades instead of taking on debt for useless degrees.
There's truth in those criticisms. Colleges did price themselves out of reach. They did become ideologically rigid. They did abandon core principles of free inquiry. The value proposition did collapse. And they deserve criticism for these failures.
But celebrating the death of higher education because you don't like campus politics is like burning down your house because you found a spider. The question isn't whether universities need reform—they obviously do. The question is whether we can reform them before they collapse entirely, and whether we can do so in a political environment where half the country has been taught that education itself is the enemy.
When you have failing K-12 schools producing functionally illiterate applicants, colleges closing at accelerating rates, unsustainable costs and crushing debt, AI eliminating entry-level knowledge work, universities that alienate half the country through ideological overreach, and political leaders who turn legitimate criticism into anti-intellectual tribalism—you don't just get worse colleges. You get a less capable society. You get a democracy that can't process complex information. You get a population that's easy to manipulate because they've been taught that thinking carefully is elitist and trusting experts is naive.
Forrest Gump's mama said, "Stupid is as stupid does.” But she was wrong about one thing: stupid isn't just about actions. It's about systems. It's about what we model, what we reward, and what we celebrate. Universities modeled ideological conformity when they should have modeled open inquiry. And in response, political leaders modeled contempt for learning when they should have demanded better. Now we have the worst of both worlds.
The colleges closing? That's just the preview. The real crisis is what happens to a society that lets its institutions fail through ideological excess, then responds to that failure by deciding that education itself is the enemy.
And that's a crisis no amount of AI can solve.
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