Ch013–1 The Day Colleges Died (2029)

Serializing Insight Colleges, how Women In Congress re-invented liberal arts college curriculum and teaching methods to produce graduates who could redeem and restore SpaceShip Earth

Part one of three

It was student suffering which eventually brought the college crisis to the attention of Women In Congress.

In January 2029, to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of the Sept-Nov. 1929 Wall Street Crash, many progressives were excitedly preparing for summer 2029 parades, marches and teach-in events. The theme was, “NEVER AGAIN!” Various groups were mobilizing their members to push for more equitable taxing of wealthy elites; and, more fair sharing of wealth in the form of healthcare for all. Let’s make the world more fair for the 99% not just the top 1%.

Several activist groups around the country were busy designing and constructing giant puppets; and, giant inflatable balloons, for local events. In New York City, several political puppet theater groups were given grants. Large puppets and blimps were commissioned for an Alternative Macy’s Parade in July, in Washington, D.C.

Women In Congress neither endorsed nor attacked these efforts — while secretly being mostly pleased and amused. The plan for Summer Conference 2029 was to celebrate and expand on the Best Practices made more public in recent years. Women at all levels had stepped in, ready, able, willing and wanting to fill job and leadership vacancies and do better than the men had. Since 2021, quality of life had improved for the 99%. All women, young women and girls especially, were being empowered to take leadership roles.

Also worth celebrating in 2029 was the progress away from the emotional emptiness, emotional hollowness, of one-sided, color-blind male leadership. Women leaders and followers were gradually replacing this with warmer workplace relations; and, warmer-richer-saner parent-child interactions.

The hope for Summer 2029 Conference was to raise higher, the public profile of Best Practices in interpersonal competency. What else could be done with these methods? Where else, what new places wanted training and practice in these methods? Many unexpected beneficial side-effects eventuated: increased voter registration, more voter turnout, less gun violence, slowly lowering suicide rates. It was a no-brainer to do more of what worked in 2029.

Well, that was the plan anyway.

As it turned out, the public’s attention in 2029–2032 was hijacked in new directions Women In Congress never imagined.

Greta Kubler’s complaint against colleges

Excerpt from The Day Colleges Died (2033) by Vera Similitude, Head, 2031 Commission on College Collapse

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It was a Friday morning in November, 2029, in Ohio. Greta Kubler, a sophomore in her local liberal arts college, decided not to attend classes today. Her friends, wondering where she was, texted her. All she replied is, “I’m busy today :)”

She made a sandwich board sign 2.5 feet high. She made a sandbag to weigh it down so it would not blow away in the wind. She typed up a one page flyer. She drove to the copy store. She made 75 copies. She drove to the Ohio State House, right in her own hometown. In the cold wind, she lugged her sandwich board and backpack up the building’s broad steps. She set up her sandwich board on the steps (no larger than police regulations permitted, she had looked this up).

The sign read, “BOYCOTT COLLEGES. STOP GOING.” She handed out her flyer to anyone who would take it. Some of the people coming and going were her elected state representatives and their staff.

What else did the flyer say? “Liberal arts colleges are no more than Glorified High Schools. STOP GOING. DON’T ENROLL. DON’T WASTE YOUR MONEY. Think outside the box. How can YOU make this world more wonderful for the 99% of people? Colleges only put you on a corporate career track, raping SpaceShip Earth. Find your passion and ASK for APPRENTICESHIPS.

The rest of the page was online links to alternatives to college:

- apprenticeships,

- gap years abroad between high school and college,

- American Friends (Quaker) Service Committee projects in third world countries, working while learning a new language.

Unknown to Greta Kubler, two of the adults who took papers were employed by WJW-TV (Cleveland, OH) the big local news station. They returned within an hour with a cameraman to interview Greta.

Greta had lots to say. In her first TV interview she said,

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Any high school kid can now research colleges online in great depth. The more we look, the more obvious it is, liberal arts colleges are in a tail-spin, possibly going extinct.

What are colleges doing about the problems graduates face? Nothing. They talk. Colleges aren’t graduating seniors who can save SpaceShip Earth from crashing and burning. They produce too few graduates who can slow down the death spiral. College research is often funded by the very corporations most destructive to Nature and to open public discourse.

Why go? I’m not going. I invite all high school seniors to boycott college. Invest your resources where you can personally make a positive difference.

“When I was in high school, I received an average of three invitations a week, from colleges, to apply. I was exploited. I was being marketed as a commodity to colleges, not as a person. Student loans are a corporate profit center. It’s not fair to me. It’s not fair to other high school students. It’s not fair to Mother Earth.

The interviewer asked, “Greta, you’re a college sophomore What’s your plan?”

“I’m getting out. I’m going to find an internship at an existing public bank, where we make things better for the 99%. I’m going to learn all I can. If I can’t get a job there, I’ll get a job at a public bank start-up.

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The first WJW-TV interview concluded with sympathetic interviewer remarks, “Have colleges lost the moral ground they once stood on? Why was there no response from colleges to the 2023 announcement of Male Gender Collapse? Is anyone proposing solutions? Are there any colleges Greta could be happy at? Are liberal arts colleges ‘circling the drain’?”

In only days, the video of Greta’s protest went viral. The next Friday, she made more flyers, came again to the steps with her little sign and passed out flyers again. She ran out of her 75 flyers in 15 minutes.

Greta started to hear from her friends doing their own research into how troubled liberal arts colleges were as businesses. These were not journalists These were teenagers. What was heard most dramatically from several voices was, “If a meaningful purpose for my life exists, I doubt I can find it at most liberal arts colleges, the way they are today.”

The third Friday, Greta had nine friends passing out their own flyers with her. WJW-TV came again to interview the teens. Six weeks in, there were 50 students passing out flyers to passerby’s on Fridays.

One day, while handing out leaflets, Greta was called out as a “Cultural Creative.” She didn’t know the term. Was it an insult? A joke? At home she looked it up. She came to realize she fit the “Cultural Creative” profile closely. In her future interviews, she used this term. she spoke about to survive, colleges needed Cultural Creative students more than students needed colleges.

Few college programs even knew what a Cultural Creative was, let alone their preferences and needs. As college enrollments sank, colleges increasingly concentrated on finding “Sheeple” to fill Freshman classes. Sheeple: those who go along blindly, thoughtlessly, into a future of consumerism and debt-slavery.

Have colleges become obsolete?

No one including Greta was arguing for liberal arts colleges to close; yet, their numbers steadily declined each year. They were making themselves obsolete. Greta wanted colleges to exist — yet not as they were, filling the world with Sheeple. Where were colleges where she and other Cultural Creatives could thrive?

Greta and many Cultural Creative high schoolers who wanted the “college experience” were hard-pressed to identify, behind vague, foggy words, what values a college stood for. What hard evidence, courses, programs policies, supported the lofty value statements in brochures and websites? Again, a child had shown the Emperor was standing naked in the public square, only imagining he was fully clothed.

Are colleges for or against the 99%?

It was impossible to tell in many cases, even in on-campus visits if college X stood with or against the 99%? College Vision, Mission, Product statements were vague and murky. The words got in the way. Tuition and student indebtedness kept rising.

Since it’s inception, Fortune Magazines, “100 Best Companies to Work For” had had no well-known colleges on its annual list. For example in 2019 only Bright Horizons Family Solutions made the top 100 at number 66. Is it a college? No. “The day-care and preschool company runs 741 different locations nationwide…”

Colleges morally bankrupt

In her second interview, in a news studio, Greta told the camera, “I’ve done my own research. The vast majority of liberal arts colleges are teetering on bankruptcy. Only the top 12–20 Ivy League colleges are thriving. Ninety-five percent of US colleges and universities have an endowment equivalent to less than 1 percent of Harvard’s (https://www.thenation.com/article/society/american-universities-crisis/).

Not only this, colleges are:

- Bankrupt emotionally, too much attention paid to only the rational, male intellect, little attention paid to how live a healthy balanced life,

- Bankrupt ethically-morally. Why? The top colleges, with big endowments, all function primarily as hedge funds, managing money, not educating the next generations in best practices in how to make the world better. Only a small fraction of their income comes from tuition. They care little about educating the next generations of voters and leaders,

- Bankrupt in terms of interpersonal decency. Colleges lack leadership. No one’s stemming the tide of regressive cancel culture. Students, faculty and administrators all feel unsafe to hold unpopular ideas, let alone voice them,

- Bankrupt in interpersonal competency. Who’s teaching the next generation people skills to get along? To avoid unnecessary conflict? How to respond when conflict does arise? No one. It’s to the point students simply don’t speak in college classrooms ((‘Speaking Freely’: Measuring students’ reactions to peer expression — https://www.thefire.org/speaking-freely-measuring-students-reactions-to-peer-expression/). Why don’t colleges teach good people skills? No one’s happy there.”

“Liberal arts colleges can’t last the way they are. Colleges made themselves irrelevant and obsolete to the biggest need youth today have, to fix SpaceShip Earth, to set it on a sustainable course for our generation’s future. Colleges are part of the problem! I will not invest my parent’s money in them.

“I don’t see any future in colleges or the corporations they serve by providing new “cannon fodder” employees. Why aren’t there more apprenticeships available? They would be cheaper and more practical for keeping people employed.

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Soon, Greta was interviewed as a serious journalism subject, a potential TIME “person of the year.” She voiced her alarm about “an elephant in the living room,” no one was attending to: Most colleges were “circling the drain.” Did no one care? College curriculum and teaching methods were less and less relevant to the jobs-scape after college. Efforts to make colleges more relevant to graduating students were not working. Corporate funding was still too much a factor in college budgets. Greta asked, “Who is in charge here? What is being done?”

College presidents were asked for comment and came to interviews prepared with talking points. College presidents, male and female, criticized protestors, questioned demonstrators on their facts. College presidents blamed young protestors — their customers — for weak or no ability to take in criticism. Comical to many viewers, such was the clear case with these college presidents: no unwillingness to self-examine nor self-evaluate. It became more clear to the public why so many colleges had been “circling the drain” since 2005.

Women in Congress heard Greta. 100% of women elected to Congress had attended college. Many felt loyal to colleges as a necessary cultural institution. So they did their own research:

“Deterioration of the academic core” (2017)

- “Much of the concern revolves around a perceived deterioration of the academic core in which, the thinking goes, the university’s teaching and research priorities are increasingly compromised by external financial and political interests.” — https://www.eui.eu/ProgrammesAndFellowships/AcademicCareersObservatory/Bibliography/GablerAbstract

- Eighty percent of students enrolled in a community college — around 7 million, the majority from low-income, minority, or immigrant families — hope to earn a bachelor’s degree, but fewer than 15 percent succeed in doing so within six years.

Students from families in the top 1 percent income bracket are almost 80 times more likely to attend an Ivy League or other highly selective college than those from families in the bottom 20 percent (https://www.thenation.com/article/society/american-universities-crisis/)

- The US Dept. of Education claimed no responsibility for the quality of college education. It occupied itself solely with student loans, Pell grants, laws and guidance for the disabled; and, collecting statistics.

- Speakers at Monday Lunch explained between 1945 and 1990 the United States built the largest and most productive higher education system in world history. Over the last two decades, however, dramatic budget cuts to public academic services and skyrocketing tuition made college completion more difficult for many students. Meanwhile, the global competition for educated workers mean ever growing demand.

- College reform experts explained useful college reform ideas, with lists of experts signed on to them, simply sat on shelves, gathering dust. Best Practices which could have been incorporated decades before, were still “in discussion.” Not one college could be found employing BluePrint of WE.

- High schools were graduating more and more Cultural Creative seniors like Greta, individuals already thinking for themselves, researching, documenting and publishing truths the Establishment found “inconvenient.”

- Cultural Creative students were effectively critiquing college reform intransigence in Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts (2014) EDITED BY MICHAEL W. KIRST AND MITCHELL L. STEVENS (visible on books.google and Amazon Look Inside):

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… In short — colleges did not know how to share, cooperate and collaborate on common interests and needs. “Little energy or thought is given to the experiences of other colleges. Few lessons are learned which might inform or enhance local chances of success. Except as they benchmark to each other competitively — rarely do colleges-universities build on the work of their peers. Seldom do they engage in comparative study.”

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- A famous college president, Clark Kerr, coined the phrase “the city of intellect” to point to the best aspects of colleges. As the one-sided, color-blind intellect was dying everywhere else — here too in colleges, it was dying as their reason for existing.

Again, Women had to face the pattern of male failure: Any one-sided approach to life fails inevitably.

- Speakers at Monday Lunch with Experts pointed to the wholesale failure of colleges as “absentee fathers,” and “father abandonment” writ large, for several generations of teens.

- Republic Regressives and Wall Street Democrats had commodified college and student life; then, sold their product back to students. Financial corporations kept students in debt-slavery for decades. Cheaper graduations were $20,000 to $40,000 plus interest. Worse? Male Congressmen were often investors in for-profit colleges and college debt collection agencies.

- Colleges demonstrated over and over their lack of ability to respond creatively to multiple pressures; including, the changing needs of students.

Women In Congress began asking each other Greta’s questions: What does a liberal arts college education stand for now? What’s its purpose? Where can teens receive healthy guidance and direction for a life worth living after college? From social media? (No). From each other? From corporations? Are colleges no longer doing their job?

Failing colleges became a national-international story.

“Hundreds of colleges fear closing or merging” (2019)

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… 14% of college presidents say they could see their own college closing or merging in the next five years. Although 14% seems small, over a few thousand institutions that’s a good couple of hundred colleges. Normally it’s external analysts prophesying the demise of colleges but this time it’s the actual people in charge forecasting their own demise. …

Digging into their numbers, there have been a staggering 139 institutions who have closed, merged or consolidated since 2016 with a further 36 planned to close or merge from 2019 to 2023. The majority of these are Private for-profit institutions (74) and the remainder are Private Nonprofit (63) and Public (36).

https://www.pilbaragroup.com/hundreds-of-colleges-fear-closing-or-merging/

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“The new Necessities to Partner”

Merging Colleges for Mutual Growth: A New Strategy for Academic Managers (1994) by James Martin, was the first comprehensive handbook for those involved in―or considering―college mergers and consolidation. For both American and British higher education, it was the first study of higher ed mergers apart from bankruptcy-related purposes. The authors cited numerous instances of successful mergers in the United States and Great Britain, offering specific examples to explain why they succeeded.

The updated second edition appeared in 2017: Consolidating Colleges and Merging Universities: New Strategies for Higher Education Leaders by James Martin, James E. Samels. The authors spoke to the rising interest in both full institutional merger and in closure. They invited colleges to use the phrases “strategic alliances,” “strategic collaboration” and “the consolidation of American higher education” as salable euphemisms for cutting off educational opportunity after Grade 12 for the next generations of middle and lower income families.

Additional references:

Mergers and Alliances in Higher Education 2015 Edition by Curaj

Strategic Mergers in Higher Education (2019) by Ricardo Azziz, Guilbert C. Hentschke — “…the closure and merger rates of colleges and universities are predicted to increase significantly in the coming decade …”

The College Stress Test: Tracking Institutional Futures (2020) by Robert Zemsky, ‎Susan Shaman, ‎Susan Campbell Baldridge.

Speakers at Monday Lunch With Experts supported Women understanding what was broken in colleges and how bad the situation was. No expert could offer any sort of incremental, gradual fix. Colleges organized by males, for male profit, promoting male values of competition and win~lose, was culturally exhausted, an empty paradigm. What do you replace it with?

No one had anticipated the day would come when colleges would disappear. Could this happen? Would all degrees henceforth come from YouTube University?