In my last essay for Brownstone, I wrote about the economic price colleges and universities have paid for unnecessarily and unwisely shutting down their campuses for months on end during the covid “pandemic:” loss of enrollment, budget cuts, and in some cases, closures. Here, I would like to address the human costs of those disastrous decisions, particularly to students and their families but also to faculty and staff and even communities.

First, let’s acknowledge that all the economic hardships I mentioned in that earlier piece do indeed come with a human cost. That is, they affect real people. Enrollment declines are not just descending plot points on some graph; they represent actual students who are no longer attending classes and getting degrees.

It’s common these days to hear conservatives assert that young people don’t need to go to college to be successful, and there is certainly some truth to that. In addition, many conservative parents are understandably reluctant to send their kids off to a state university—or, for that matter, any university—to be indoctrinated into Marxist ideology, as they almost certainly will be. Drexel business professor Stanley Ridgley has written the definitive book on this phenomenon, Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Neo-Marxist Brainwashing on College Campuses.