If someone had predicted 50 years ago that, in 1999, the primary and secondary schools in the United States would be a mess, and urban public schools an absolute disaster, most Americans would have called that person an alarmist. Today, when anyone dares to suggest that U.S. higher education has serious problems, most listeners give the same response. We have the greatest colleges and universities in the world. But if current trends continue, we will soon face a day of reckoning. 

Tuition is so high that the poor are frozen out of higher education, in spite of expanded scholarship programs. Middle-class parents are having a difficult time meeting college expenses. They deplete their savings, remortgage their homes, invade their 401(k) plans, and work two and three jobs to pay their children's college bills. Estimates indicate that about half of graduates leave college with student loans that take years to pay off. 
In their zeal to bring in dollars, colleges and universities admit students who can't handle the course work but who may be able to pay the bills. When that happens, everyone suffers-especially the students. But rather than rejecting or expelling those who are ill prepared or lazy, we attempt to remediate them. We make many of our courses too easy, while grade inflation gets students through those that are more difficult. Rigorous core curricula have almost disappeared. Graduation requirements are so relaxed that many employers who seek to fill even entry-level positions just shake their heads in disbelief. 

Political correctness and diversity have taken priority in admissions decisions and in classrooms over experience in calculus, foreign languages, physics, chemistry, and Shakespeare. We emphasize the differences in people rather than what they have in common. We keep adding programs and courses to our already bloated curricula in an attempt to be all things to all people. 

Meanwhile, faculty members do ever more meaningless research, while spending fewer and fewer hours in the classroom, during an academic year that we have shortened in recent decades.