Beneath the weather of the daily headlines, slow tectonic shifts are changing America’s political landscape.
Demographic developments are moving voters (and congressional seats, and electoral votes) from blue states to red ones.
Trust in the traditional media — routinely in the tank for Democrats — has plummeted.
And the entire education industry, a key pillar of the leftist establishment, is now crumbling, too.
The long decline of higher education — the subject of my 2012 book “The Higher Education Bubble” — has been slowly accelerating for over a decade, driven by sky-high tuition and shrinking employment prospects for recent college grads.
When Hampshire College in Massachusetts announced its plans to close last week, it became the latest private college to fall victim to the ruin.
Others include King’s College in New York, Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama and St. Andrews in North Carolina, among many more.
More than a quarter of the nation’s private colleges is at risk of closure in the next decade, NPR reported last week.
Even some law schools have gone out of business.
As I predicted, small, expensive private schools that aren’t at the top of the prestige ladder are the first to go — though some, like Hampshire, are fairly fancy.
But the impact is much broader.
Back in the 1970s, college underwent a huge societal change.
Before that, going to college was a choice made by only a few; after, it became an essential ticket to respectable middle-class or upper-middle-class status.
Now we seem to be reverting to a more traditional view, as college takes a less central role in societal expectations.
As young people see older relatives, neighbors and others graduate college with crippling debt and no job prospects, the downside of devoting four years to higher education seems more plain.
And the image of college as a carefree period of fun is undercut by the cheerless wokescolds who run many campuses.
Colleges today are awarding the smallest number of humanities degrees since 1991, 30% below 2012.
Two decades ago, I’d often hear journalists express hope that their publication would stay afloat until they could retire.
Now I hear the same thing from fellow professors.
This is dreadful news for leftists, who have used universities as their money laundry and recruiting ground for decades.
Taxpayer money flows in (whether the institution is public or private); power and influence flow out.
Leftists are hired as faculty, activists are paid to be speakers or “visiting scholars,” leftist books and documentaries are bought and inflicted on students, and a vast bloated campus bureaucracy provides day jobs for dedicated true believers.
Now all that is in peril.
College won’t disappear, but the glory days — and lavish funding — are clearly in the rear-view mirror.
Those institutions that are still flourishing seem to be disproportionately located in red states, and are often explicitly non-woke.
Meanwhile, public K-12 education is undergoing a decline of its own.
A recent report from Bellwether, an education think tank, explored the sharp decline in public-school enrollment, which deepened during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eight states — California, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and West Virginia — are on pace to see enrollment plummet by more than 10% in the next five years, researchers found.
Some of this is pure demographics, tied to lower birth rates.
But some of it is tied to a loss of faith in public schools.
During the COVID years, Americans saw that educators’ priorities seemed to center on ensuring teachers didn’t actually have to come in to work.
The lockdowns also exposed parents to the poor quality of the lessons and texts their kids were studying.
This has produced a boom in homeschooling, which is no longer a marginal phenomenon: There are now over 3.4 million homeschooled students, more than 6% of the K-12 population, and those numbers are growing.
Private-school enrollment has grown in 24 states since 2012, and that too will likely increase as more states adopt voucher and scholarship programs.
And the significant growth in charter-school enrollment has also chipped away at the power of traditional public schools.
These trends, too, hurt the left.
Public-school teachers lean overwhelmingly Democratic, as do their unions and the bloated armies of public-school administrators and staff.
They form a ready source of campaign donations, volunteers and voters — and as they shrink, so does an essential part of the leftist base.
Like universities, public schools won’t go away, but they are withering just when the left needs them most.
No wonder the Democrats have been so eager to import fresh voters via immigration, and to indoctrinate the children of conservatives in left-leaning educational institutions.
And no wonder they’re seeming a bit desperate these days to use gerrymandering and election shenanigans to lock down their power for as long as they can.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
