Jonathan Marks: Let’s Be Reasonable: a Conservative Case for Liberal Education

Excerpt

In the world university rankings of the Times Higher Education Supplement, fourteen of the top twenty schools are American, and American schools dominate the top hundred. The USA has one of the globe’s highest rates of university educational attainment. University degrees bestow on graduates an ever-increasing income premium. Nevertheless, public estimation of American universities is in decline. In 2019, according to Pew, only half of adults viewed them positively. This poor result largely reflected a bearish attitude among conservatives. In Georgetown’s “American Institutional Confidence Poll,” universities ranked second from the top among Democrats, behind only Amazon and ahead of the military. Republicans ranked universities fifteenth, barely ahead of Congress and labor unions. …