In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call I review the recent book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education? The book has been getting a lot of attention — and deserves it.
To put the authors’ case in a nutshell, college and university education in the U.S. costs much more than it needs to and delivers much less education than it should. It’s a splendid deal for administrators and tenured professors, but bad for the rest of us who foot the bills and especially students who get little education of lasting value.
Do we have the beginnings of a left-right convergence here? The critique Hacker and Dreifus give echoes themes familiar to those who have read Charles Murray and Thomas Sowell. In fact, Sowell blasts Hacker’s book Money in his book Intellectuals and Society, but they’re clearly in agreement on the waste and folly of our higher education system.
