Plenty:

Since World War II, a college degree was rightly seen as the key to middle class upward mobility. That belief was enshrined, and so we forgot to ask whether everyone was suited for college, or whether the college educated per se were always more important to the economy than the self-, union-, or trade-schooled welder, concrete finisher, or electrician.

Let Victor Davis Hanson count the ways academia has run off the rails:

I spent a great deal of my life in the university as a student and professor and now as a researcher. Higher learning in the arts and humanities has enriched American life for 200 years. Small liberal arts colleges like Hillsdale, St. John’s, St. Thomas Aquinas, and dozens of others continue to be models of enlightened learning. But all that said, increasingly public universities and the larger private institutions have become morally and fiscally bankrupt.

Group Think has become the order of the day:

The effect of politicized learning on the quality of education was unfortunate in a strange sort of cyclical fashion. The more “–studies” classes saturated the curriculum, the less time there was for classical approaches to literature, philosophy, language, or history. The more the profile of the student body became more important than its preparation, the more these classes had to be watered down, as if thinking the right thoughts could justify the absence of the old rigor.

Internecine squabbling and political correctness have led to unhappy consequences, sometimes visible on TV screens:

Careers were destroyed by charges of “racism,” “sexism,” or “homophobia,” rarely through smearing a Mormon in class, or skipping a week of instruction to junket at a conference. All of the above is well-known, as hundreds of exposes in the last thirty years have explained to us quite well why college graduates are both so politicized and so lacking in knowledge and the inductive method. We see them screaming in videos at Occupy Wall Street demonstrations — full of self-pity it is true, but also in a sense worthy of pity as well. Nothing is worse than to be broke, unemployed, and conned.

It wasn’t long before government meddling — through grants and loans — had a deleterious impact:

There is a new element in the equation. Debt. Almost every year, tuition climbed at a rate higher than inflation. It had to. Higher paid faculty taught fewer classes. “Centers,” run by professors who did not teach and full of new staff, addressed everything from declining literacy to supposedly illiberal epidemics of meanness. Somewhere around 1980, the university was no longer a place to learn, but a sort of surrogate parent, eagerly taking on the responsibility of ensuring that students were happy, fit, right thinking, and committed. That required everything from state-of-the-art gyms replete with climbing walls, to grief counselors, to lecture series and symposia on global warming and the West Bank. All that was costly.

To pay for it, the federal government guaranteed student loans and the university charged what they wished — with the hook that the interest need not be paid until after graduation. For an 18-year-old, taking on debt was easy, paying it back something to be dealt with in the distant future — especially when the university promised higher-paying jobs and faculty reminded college students that their newly acquired correct-thinking was in itself worth the cost of education.

But those promises are often unfulfilled. See Hanson’s PJ Media article, “The Fannie and Freddie University,” here.