During my second career teaching high school English, I noticed several darkly funny but disturbing trends in “higher” education. They were fueled by three primary drivers: abandoning merit, the federal government taking over the student loan industry, and DEI hysteria.
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It was Barack Obama who federalized the student loan industry, pushing the idea that everyone should go to college. To make that idea a reality, it was necessary for the government to guarantee student loans.
That had plenty of unfortunate and foreseeable effects. Because Colleges no longer had any financial skin in the game, they went on a mad administrator-hiring binge, which required enormous amounts of money, which required unprecedented numbers of students.
Combined with a faux-religious devotion to DEI, colleges admitted all manner of people who in past years would have reasonably been found to be poorly suited to do college-level work. To cover this, it was necessary to do away with any sort of predictive testing like the SAT. All that was required for college admission was a student loan, unless one was a white male applying at an Ivy League school. Those guys, regardless of academic qualification, were often denied.
Enormous DEI departments with all manner of administrators and functionaries were established, and hundreds of millions were wasted on DEI gurus imported to inspire them.
So unprepared were so many, colleges were forced to establish remedial high schools on campus. It was a great scam. Full tuition for no credit, and blame students’ lack of ability on high school teachers like me, who could have told them who wasn’t academically capable if anyone had bothered to ask.
Grade inflation was a direct result of these disasters. It was necessary to hide the scams, so professors were required not only to dumb down the content of their classes and to require far less work, but to award unearned grades. An entire generation of college students was conditioned to expect maximum grades for minimum and poor work. And God help any professor who gave a minority student the grade their lack of work deserved.
As a result, innumerable students took 6-7 years to get a 4-year degree at enormous cost, but many simply dropped out without a degree, bearing enormous debt they had no credentials or ability to pay off.
I’m certainly not arguing college should be denied to anyone. I’ve known many people who struggled greatly but managed to earn a degree and were better and more productive people for it. I am arguing for rational decision-making and fiscally sound, ethical colleges.
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The second Trump Administration has seen substantial success in forcing higher education to do away with DEI and to restore some degree of credibility to college degrees, which in recent years have come to mean little or nothing. But as the University of Michigan has recently demonstrated, there remains much to be done:
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So, students get a semester off to “acclimate to the demands of a University of Michigan education?” Not terribly long ago, students were expected to be ready for that when they first set foot on campus, and if they weren’t, academic probation was ready to encourage them.
And there’s a “mental health crisis” at the University of Michigan caused by expecting college students to do college-level work? Graduating people who lack the mental stability to be sufficiently responsible to do college assignments tends not to give employers faith in University of Michigan degrees, particularly in science-related fields.
The misadventures of Jason Arday at Cambridge, one of the Western world’s storied universities, are instructive. Without question an outrageously DEI hire, Arday didn’t show up to teach classes, had no teaching ability, was a blatant plagiarist, and, when challenged, cried “racism,” and so did Cambridge in defending his indefensible conduct and manifest lack of ability. How he managed to obtain a doctorate remains unanswered, perhaps unanswerable. In the aftermath of Arday’s forced resignation, a Cambridge faculty member felt the need to remain anonymous:
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That academic’s conclusions are remarkable mainly because circa 2026, it would be necessary for anyone to publicly state such obvious understandings about the nature of higher education. Arday, whose supposed qualifications and accomplishments should have set off every alarm at Cambridge, was instead praised and defended despite being far more of a charlatan than Professor Harold Hill, but without the roguish charm.
Those lies apparently cost Arday far more than an academic reputation.
Replacing merit with identity/sexual politics and eternal grievance has been a disaster for higher education and for America. College has been, and ever must be, a proving ground, a place where one not only learns a body of useful knowledge but demonstrates the character necessary to apply it. Hard work, determination, reliability, sincerity, honesty, and more must be forged in that crucible, just as it still is in the professional trades where one produces or walks.
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, lifelong athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.
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