Harvard has many competitive advantages, but vocational education isn’t one of them.
If you doubt that America’s elite universities have lost their way, consider that, as part of a settlement with the Trump administration, Harvard is considering building trade schools. Whatever Harvard’s comparative advantage is — and it has many! — it is not in vocational education.
US colleges and universities attract the world’s best students and academics, and produce research that powers the global economy. But the share of Americans who have a lot of trust in higher education has declined 15 percentage points over the last decade, to 42% — and trust in the Ivy League stands at just 15%. President Donald Trump is going after America’s elite universities for a reason: Institutions that should be a source of national pride have become divisive (if not detested) because they have lost sight of their mission and why they are worthy of taxpayer support.
And what is that mission? If you listen to college administrators, they describe institutions that are less about nurturing academic excellence than about constructing an elite with the right values and sense of civic engagement. In 2016, for example, Princeton changed its informal motto to be, “In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity.”
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
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