Why Do Colleges Make People Unhappy?

My friend James Creigh recently alerted me to a new study showing that relatively young (18-to-40-year-old) American women who consider themselves “liberal” are more than twice as likely to be unhappy as those calling themselves “conservative.” According to the 2024 American Family Survey of 3,000 individuals, only 12 percent of liberal women said they were “completely satisfied with life,” compared with 28 percent of moderate and 37 percent of conservative women. Other statistics, for example on very high suicide rates among young American males, suggest that the existence of a depressing ennui is not restricted to women.

How and where do young Americans form their political beliefs and other perspectives on life? In many different ways and places, of course, but the coll ege experience is often the most important, training young persons during that critical transition between adolescence and adulthood.

It is indeed the universities that have been at the forefront of the modern DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) obsession, stressing perceived racial and other injustices. Many studies have shown that college faculty are overwhelmingly liberal in their orientation. Exploding administrative bureaucracies have also contributed to the crowding out of analyses of traditional truths and ideas.

Moreover, student-affairs offices often almost rejoice in flouting traditional moral standards. For example, undergraduate students tell me that their schools practically drop condoms out of airplanes over campus and not only tolerate but almost tacitly encourage premarital sex in student housing. And, returning to female unhappiness, remember that today’s colleges are dominated by women, who constitute nearly 60 percent of enrollments.

The prevailing contemporary zeitgeist on American campuses has emphasized injustice and perceived oppression, stressing racial differences. Vast new campus bureaucracies, particularly DEI offices, support this perspective. The collegiate message largely has been, “Life in America is cruel and unjust, and you need to get indignant about it.” Protests over perceived injustices have persisted, some harming innocent, conscientious students, and often accompanied by such deplorable characteristics as antisemitism, property destruction, and the shouting down of speakers.

To be sure, complaints about universities are not new. In a speech announcing his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan said universities don’t “teach self-respect, s elf-discipline, and law and order,” adding that a great university might be “brought to its knees by a noisy, dissident minority.”

But, increasingly, young people have started asking: Do I really need to go deeply in debt to be in such a depressing environment? Why not go briefly to a trade school, get a decently paying job as a plumber, welder, or computer programmer, and enjoy life with little debt? Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg did okay but did not graduate from college.

After 2010, enrollments started plummeting at numerous non-selective-admission schools. My next book, out April 15, Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education, argues that a revival in productive higher learning in America is possible, even likely, but we must destroy some schools and scare others into institutional sanity.

Therefore, it is not surprising that I sense a major anti-woke counter-revolution underway on many campuses. The local Catholic church near Ohio University has seen a dramatic upsurge in church attendance among students, with some men dressing in suits or women wearing veils at Sunday mass. I am told that dozens attended a recent weekend retreat, unheard of a decade ago. Meanwhile, a storefront Protestant church emphasizing traditional values has had similarly explosive growth.

In the heart of the Rust Belt in Steubenville, Ohio, enrollment at the ultraconservative Franciscan University has exploded, even as the community around it continues a precipitous population decline. Further west, culturally conservative Brigham Young University has seen exploding enrollments, in th e past generation opening a huge new campus in Idaho with enrollment now well into the five digits.

Schools with a strong, traditional, secular-classical curriculum, along with a vibrant religious heritage, such as Hillsdale College, are booming, accumulating growing endowments and prestige. God and truth-seeking are certainly not dead in collegiate America.

It appears that many young Americans are steering away from the colleges where the predominant message is that they live in a terrible country that is the scourge of Planet Earth. The leaders of colleges that have gone all-in for “progressive” mantras might ask themselves if their ideological environment is costing them students.

Attendees at a recent Washington, D.C., meeting held by the higher-education establishment’s most powerful group, the American Council on Education, were allegedly stunned while listening to accounts of the latest Trump administration proposals impacting them. They wondered: How do we stop these attacks on our citadels of woke learning? Where are our friends Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer when we need them? Answer: Either retired by the voters or working in comparative obscurity with dramatically diminished clout.

What is transpiring now in higher education is the appearance of a central characteristic of American capitalism that made America the richest nation the world has ever seen, creating a country so popular that one of its biggest problems is keeping large numbers of unwanted outsiders from entering.

Schumpeterian “creative destruction” is a central factor in American economic growth, destroying or weakening firms that do not adjust to changing technology, human tastes, or prices (remember Kmart? Eas tman Kodak?). Once-great companies have disappeared or become shadows of their former selves. But their death or retrenchment has freed up resources that support today’s new high-tech companies, whose innovations have so enriched our lives. Schumpeter’s observation applies to colleges as well as business firms.

In the past couple of years, there has been an uptick in deaths among colleges. The end of a rise in collegiate fatalities depends on a renewal of collegiate sanity.

The anti-woke revival on college campuses recognizes the contributions made both in the secular and spiritual realms by such diverse business folks as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Sam Walton—but also Moses, Socrates, and Jesus Christ.

Contempt for the past, the arrogant sense that we are the Smartest Generation with a moral and intellectual superiority entitling us to disdain our ancestors, is increasingly being rejected, as more private schools at the K-12 level are reviving an interest in the classics, and state governments are nudging public colleges to end DEI and embrace more study of our glorious past and extraordinary system of government.

To be sure, other factors are at work as well in explaining rising unhappiness, including, probably, the unintended consequences of young people isolated with their social media, along with the rising use of dangerous drugs. But our colleges, cause of much of the problem, could become part of the solution as well.