via althouse:
As the Democrats have become the party of the college-educated, and as higher education has become dominated by left-leaning staff and students, Republicans have grown more skeptical that colleges are environments where either their ideas or their children are welcome [according to Frederick Hess, an education-policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. But the more] pointed critique… is a populist one, and it reflects sentiments that can be found these days on the left as well as the right. Economists have shown that higher education as a whole has become more stratified by income and class over the last 20 years…. Hess says many conservatives have grown skeptical that students are learning much at these selective institutions. Instead, he says, college has become simply a place for students to collect a gold-plated credential. ‘It’s a racketeering situation,’ Hess said when we spoke last month. ‘In many elite occupations, the price of admission is now an elite degree. That’s true whether it’s a posh D.C. think tank or a big consulting firm or a fancy journalistic outlet.’ For many students, Hess said, the point of an expensive college education is not to gain practical job skills. ‘It’s just a really expensive toll that lets you jump the queue and get the good jobs.’