Not just that the establishment, but the entire educational complex, from the large research universities like JHU to the community colleges, were built around a 1950s-1970's American economy and the society that supported that. And now that that is gone, what happens to all of the universities? They've been just as corrupted and degraded as the rest of it. My wife and I were talking last night about how Disneyland lines are the perfect metaphor for what has happened to American society.

From the 1950's to the 1990's there was basically no way to avoid standing in the lines, everyone was in it together and you just had to stand in the lines. Then in the 1990s they added FastPass and you could, if you were clever and planned a bit, skip some lines but you were still going to be standing in lines with everyone else, and they were free and reasonably fair process. Then in the 2010's they started to do book ahead FastPass and if you were staying in a hotel on site you could book all the good times for all the rides, to try and encourage hotel stays. And now with Lightning Lane's they are incentivized to make the line process so onerous to get you to fork over $25/person/ride to skip them. And that's where we are today: an enshitified product that is designed to give a good experience to the very wealthy, while making it worse for everyone else.

And that's the same path we've gone in entertainment, in housing, in education, in healthcare, in so much of modern American society.

Glad I'm not the only one on here who is apparently illiterate: I did the exact same misread!

Modern uni has a strong cruise-ship aesthetic.

my youngest son visited a handful of "fancy" schools near the end of highschool and he thought the whole process was nuts.

he said something like "seems like we're all expected to make a decision based on how nice the weather was when we visited and the architecture... and I don't care about either one."