My brother Dan does education policy at the Heritage Foundation (mostly on K-12) and we have chatted from time to time about whether the status quo at American universities will prevail over time — with its high costs and left-biased product line. Scholars like Charles Murray have asserted that the average college student today does not benefit from that experience, despite the widespread belief about the necessity of a college degree. Dan has made the point to me that American newspapers did not anticipate that CraigsList would destroy their entire revenue model, and maybe prestigous universities will be undermined in ways we cannot yet envision.
I bring this up as an intro to a nice piece written by Jane Shaw of the Pope Center for Higher Education about a speech delivered by Jeff Sanderfer at a recent Atlas event. It starts:
In 1996, Jeff Sandefer saw a fatal mixture of moral decay and arrogance at Enron Corporation and publicly predicted the company’s decline. He was right; Enron disintegrated within five years.
Now Sandefer senses the collapse of another hallowed institution, the U.S. system of higher education. He doesn’t know when it will happen, but he sees the “beginning of the end of a thoroughly corrupt system.”
She goes on to describe the really unique structure of the Acton School of Business that Sanderfer founded and which is earning great accolades. Read Jane Shaw’s full piece here.
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