Hmmm…
The High Cost of College and What it Does to Your Children
Each fall, nearly two million American students will leave for college for the very first time. Their education will cost $12,000 a year for a public university and up to $50,000 for a private one. Scholarships and grants reduce the cost for most families, but still, the Wall Street Journal reports that the average student leaves college with $23,186 in debt.
Nationwide, the total cost for this transaction is somewhere between 25 and 40 billion dollars per year.
At least families are getting their money’s worth.
Or not.
A recent study confirms what many parents have long suspected: going to college can make kids forget what’s important and embrace values that are counter to what they learned growing up.
Before I share this study’s results, let me say this to parents: leftist professors don’t feel sorry for you. As far as they’re concerned, you’ve been oppressing the masses to get that money anyway, so it’s deliciously ironic that you not only turn your children over to the indoctrinators, but that you fork over 50k to 200k and for the privilege of doing so.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s what the late Richard Rorty, one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century, said on the subject:
“I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities … try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own … The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point … [W]e are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours … I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents …”[1] [editor’s note: sorry for all the ellipses, but it’s hard to summarize Rorty’s windblown rhetoric].
When it comes to reshaping values, liberal universities know precisely what they’re doing. And the reality is that about four out of five students walk away from their Christian faith by the time they are in their twenties.[2]
The Indoctrination Plan:
What your child won’t learn at college: a sense of citizenship. In February, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute released its annual report entitled, “The Shaping of the American Mind.” ISI researchers studied students’ knowledge of basic citizenship questions, along with 39 issue-based propositions and found that college graduates are dangerously ignorant of basic civics.
For example, fewer than one in two college graduates know that the phrase “We hold these truths to be self evident…” is from the Declaration of Independence (10% actually think it is from the Communist Manifesto).
What your child will learn at college: liberal radicalism. According to ISI, college graduates are significantly MORE likely to believe in abortion on demand and same sex marriage, and significantly LESS likely to believe that the Bible is the word of God, that prayer should be allowed in schools, and that anyone can succeed in America with hard work and perseverance.
April 4th, 2010 6:12 pm
As an insider, do you feel this is the same for private Christian universities?
April 5th, 2010 8:05 am
I think it can be, but doesn’t have to be. There are plenty of faculty in Christian universities, even more left leaning ones, who are not about the business of indoctrinating students into leftist perspectives. On the other hand, almost any Christian university these days is likely to have some faculty who will try to do just that, except that they’ll quote scripture while doing it, unlike their purely secular counterparts.
There is simply no substitute for parents talking to their college students, maybe even getting a look at texts and reading lists from syllabi. Theoretically, these students are now adults, no longer under the parental umbrella… but since parents are usually footing at least some of the bill, they should be involved, ask questions, etc.
I have had parents ASK me which faculty I’d recommend for their student to take this or that course with. Of course, parents who are so involved and proactive are likely to have produced a student who is less vulnerable to leftist programming in the first place.
One of the best things a student can do is to try to identify some faculty who seem to have more or less traditional Christian values and theological perspectives, and stay connected with them, even when class is over. All the faculty that I know who are of that persuasion are very happy to connect with students outside of class, and even when a particular course ends, to stay connected throughout the student’s college career.
I suppose that most accurate statement I could make about the matter is this: nearly ALL “state schools” or “private secular” schools (with a tiny handful of exceptions, perhaps) are engaged in AGGRESSIVE indoctrination to the Left, virtually all the time.
Some Christian schools have some element of this, but they’re conflicted about it, and there will be people in these schools who are working against that trend. There is, of course, a spectrum of schools. Some of them are farther down this road than others. Historically, when Christian schools get far enough along that road, there comes a point where their Christianity is composed more of rhetoric and perhaps lots of “social action” than something that the founders of the institutions would recognize as “Christian.”