With a new generation of Americans saddled with $1.5 trillion in student debt, Victor Davis Hanson suggests it’s time to acknowledge the harm higher education has done to the United States. Start with the fact that an increasing majority of these debtors “either cannot pay back or simply will not.”

The Lost Decade of the 20s

One’s 20s are now redefined as the lost decade, as marriage, child-rearing, and home buying are put off, to the extent they still occur, into one’s 30s.

A Rigged System

Bitterness abounds when graduates gradually learn that their liberal anti-capitalist professors and administrators were part of a profit-rigged system by which peasant students became financial cannon fodder. For all the hipster left-wing campus atmospherics, the university operated more or less as a Madoff/Ponzi scheme: for each newly admitted class of students, the fed backed another round of usurious loans that could never be paid back by those of little means, and the university upped its prices.

Highly Paid Careerist Advisors and Counselors

The result was reduced teaching, a bonanza of release time, administrative bloat, Club Med dorms, gyms, and student unions, and epidemics of highly paid but non-teaching careerist advisors, and counselors.

The more students were considered “adults” in matters of loud and boisterous protests, obscene speech, binge drinking, common drug use, and hook-up sex, the more they wished to be treated as Victorian children.

Suddenly kids were shocked that the inebriated acted dangerously and boorishly, upset that the targets of their attack did not like them, and furious that sexual congress without commitment and love was often manipulative and embedded within male callousness and deceit.

Much more, including a prescription for reform, from VDH in American Greatness here.