By David Polansky, July 27, 2027
If it is true that the purpose of a system is what it does, then one must question the true purpose of today’s higher education system. Though originally built to expand economic opportunity, it now leaves students underemployed and mired in debt, universities with chronic deficits, employers dissatisfied, and the public increasingly skeptical of its value.
The lack of clarity about the origins and structure of today’s higher education system has helped to deepen a crisis that is now comprehensive. For students, it means rising tuition, mounting student debt, and declining labour-market value of post-secondary degrees. For faculty, it means accelerating “adjunctification”: the replacement of stable academic positions with low-paid, part-time instructors and contingent faculty who — along with graduate student instructors — now make up over 70 per cent of actual faculty). For the institutions it means chronic deficits across university programs that had for too long and too much relied on public spending and international student fees, both of which are declining and will only worsen with each shrinking pool of incoming students over the coming generations.
Much of this is compounded by the growing public antipathy to academia, in light of the spread of DEI policies across hiring and curricula. Though Canada is a bit behind the United States when it comes to that crisis, partly due to lower overall tuition costs, the model of mass education and underlying structural issues are the same.
As long-standing problems push higher education to a breaking point, they create an opportunity to rethink academia’s relationship with the broader economy. But understanding the crisis requires looking beyond today’s ideological battles. Its roots lie not in radicalism, but in the more banal forces of path dependency and unintended consequences.
A classic example of this dynamic is employer-funded healthcare in the United States, which originally arose as workaround for employers to attract desirable candidates without violating the wage-and-price controls that the Roosevelt administration had instituted during World War II. Nobody back then would have anticipated that this would become the basis for healthcare provision across the entire political economy.
The trajectory of modern mass higher education had similar origins. At the end of the Second World War, the United States and Canada both launched programs to provide college tuition funding to returning veterans. At the time the percentage of college-aged people (around 5 per cent) attending degree-granting institutions was an order of magnitude lower than it is today (today it is over 60 per cent in Canada).
The postwar expansion of universities was intended to give talented students of modest means the opportunity to pursue higher degrees. It was a laudable goal and, at first, a successful one. But it also gradually recast higher education as a vehicle for social mobility. This itself was not a bad thing: in a democracy, it is entirely natural for people seek out opportunities to better their economic circumstances. But it also created its own internal logic: as degrees became instruments of economic advantage rather than education alone, they increasingly came to be seen as public necessities. Over time, degrees became increasingly mandatory, inadvertently encouraging cheating, grade inflation, and the politicization of curricula.
As this system grew, the peer pressure to attend college created its own social and economic reality, one that was fully endorsed by political leaders. And so, there was an almost imperceptible shift from: “anyone with the necessary aptitude who wants a higher degree should be able to get one,” to “everyone must have a higher degree, full stop.”
This, in turn, has triggered a credentialing arms race. As Bachelor’s degrees became devalued (though not less expensive) over time, more and more candidates for lucrative careers found it expedient to pursue post-graduate degrees — from business schools, policy schools, and what have you — in order to stand out in a crowded job market. These degrees only rarely confer any significant expertise that couldn’t just as well be gained on the job itself, but they serve as costly signals to future employers. It is not an accident that some of the economy’s most dynamic sectors are increasingly encouraging applicants to forgo college degrees.
None of this is to diminish the intrinsic value of education itself. But the reality is that most students attend out of necessity, not love of learning. What, then, drives the modern university?
Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the university is many things at once. Above all, it serves as a mass credentialing mechanism for the wider economy: an inefficient and costly way of certifying who meets the basic requirements for different jobs.
But it is also a mechanism for social sorting: Canada is comparatively (and blessedly) free of this, but schools like Oxford and Cambridge in Britain, and Harvard and Yale in the United States, are broadly understood to confer (or validate) socioeconomic cachet in a way that goes beyond academic ability or training.
Beyond this, college serves as a kind of summer camp for almost-adults, replete with opportunities for social events, romantic pairings, sports and recreation, and political organizing. And at the pricier schools, these activities can take place amid lavish facilities. Remarkably few people who lament the spiralling costs of education are willing to forgo these perks — certainly not the administrators who depend on them to attract students. In recent decades, that competition has also become global, as colleges and universities increasingly compete for international students whose full tuitions help defray those same spiralling costs.
Universities have also long provided homes for scholars who would otherwise have to seek out individual patrons or live in penury. The deal was that they would be free to pursue their own inquiries (ideally in ways that produced meaningful knowledge) in exchange for devoting a certain amount of time to instructing the young (a task for which not all scholars are really suited).
Finally, yes, the university is also a repository of knowledge and learning, but even this is subdivided into fields in which knowledge is thought to be intrinsically as opposed to instrumentally valuable, as reflected in the divisions between the humanities and the sciences.
It is the subversion of this last purpose that critics have in mind when they lament the university’s half-century of politicization. Political criteria have overtaken scholarly and pedagogical ones in hiring, funding, publishing, devising curricula, and beyond. Moreover, it is painfully evident that those with real influence in academia remain oblivious to the full implications.
These ideological trends, while pernicious in their own right, cannot be separated from the university’s larger changes. It would be too much to claim that its use as an inculcator of ideological progressivism is simply downstream from economic factors. As a brief perusal of, e.g., Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind indicates, these are long-standing tendencies with complex philosophical origins. In brief, the philosophical tradition’s sustained self-critique gradually undermined confidence in the possibility of gaining (and teaching) true knowledge, leaving an intellectual vacuum to be filled by various political and ethnic agendas. (And don’t be misled by the “American” modifier — Bloom taught for many years at the University of Toronto and drew heavily on those experiences as well.)
But the degree to which these dynamics have intensified, to the point that they have become dominant across the humanities and social sciences, has much to do with the expansion of higher education beyond what was sustainable. Developments like DEI mandates and the substitution of political metrics for meritocratic ones are inseparable from the lowering of academic standards that resulted over time from the demand that the university be all things to all people (the Canadian policy of announcing that certain faculty postings are open exclusively to female or minority applicants is in many ways a more explicit version of American hiring practices).
Assessing students for ideological conformity or commitment to activism rather than knowledge and evaluative thinking represents a substantive educational decline. But for the same reason, it is easier for both teachers and students.
These problems have become sufficiently visible to produce widespread discontent: universities are viewed with increasing disfavour even as incoming students continue to enroll. While some of this represents the universities’ leftward political drift over the years, the decline in trust is too broad to be explained by politics alone. Its presence among degree-holders also suggests that opposition cannot simply be chalked up to ignorance or prejudice, as defenders of academia often do.
Many of the most acute concerns involve high-profile instances of egregious political bias and indoctrination (of which academia now provides daily examples), but the dissatisfaction goes beyond this and rightly so. The decline in service during the COVID-19 pandemic (without any decline in costs), the use of AI tools to complete undergraduate assignments, and the endless diversity mandates have all exposed existing flaws. A saner and more meritocratic and politically balanced academy would still inherit the same structural problems: too many students, downward pressure on performance expectations, excessive demand for the university to provide services outside of its traditional mission, increasingly devalued degrees against rising operating costs, and so on.
Meanwhile, the problems of mass education have filtered down into secondary schools as well, such that students no longer arrive at college with the same preparation as their predecessors. The problem increasingly is not that students are reading, say, Franz Fanon or Judith Butler instead of Aristotle and Locke, but that they are not reading at all. In fairness, instilling basic literacy was never understood to be one of the core tasks of the university, but this a measure of the crisis it faces, even as higher education administrators rush to embrace the same technology that has contributed to it.
But while such administrators have proven poor stewards of their own institutions, there are still policy tools available to governments. The long-needed curbing of student visas is already underway, as part of broader immigration cuts. But the public has short memories, and the university administrators will remain tempted to lobby for more generous intake numbers to shore up their own finances. Federal and provincial governments should remind their administrators that Canadian universities exist primarily for educating Canadians and especially high-calibre international students; they are not global bazaars.
And parliamentarians should push for further investigations of the higher education sector, including disciplinary actions where necessary, like that of Conestoga College.
Beyond this, they should look to interrupt the public funding pipeline that has granted niche interests — ranging from radical to merely silly — remarkable influence over the allocation of public moneys to little scholarly benefit. If the federal government intends to fund scholarship, it must hold it to higher standards.
Finally, this should prompt critical scrutiny of the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program. At present, public funding based on outdated beliefs in the value of expanding education at all costs is effectively deepening the crisis of the higher education sector at a time when the governments should be seeking to decouple it from the larger economy.
The higher education sector is too large and entrenched for the full implications of this crisis to be realized. But it is highly unlikely that what emerges will resemble the present system of mass education. Preserving the university will require a fundamental reconsideration of its purposes and its relationship with the society that sustains it.
David Polansky is a writer and political theorist living in Toronto. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, and Foreign Policy, among other venues. Read him on Substack and follow him on X.
