“You don’t want to send your son there because he’ll become a communist, he’ll become a drug addict.” That’s the modern consensus about elite colleges and universities, so why pay for modern education?
Except that the quote that begins this piece is from the 1960s. It was a parent telling another parent to not send their child to UCLA. Which is telling.
It’s a reminder that complaints about what they’re teaching college kids today are decades old, and realistically centuries. For as long as there have been universities, there have been parents warning that their graduates will surely “ruin” the United States.
That’s certainly one way to look at things now, though if you’d invested based on the investment some in the American electorate have in the looming destruction of the United States thanks to a long and successful “march” by the left to take over elite U.S. universities and the minds of the young people attending those schools, you would have missed out on the biggest bull run in the history of the richest country in the history of the world. Which hopefully elicits a little nuance from some.
As the quip from the 1960s about UCLA hopefully makes plain, there’s once again nothing new about elite, left-wing universities supposedly hijacking the minds of the very people who represent the U.S.’s future. It’s always been this way.
Some will say this time is different, but is it really different? Consider a recent report in the Wall Street Journal. Citing a 2025 survey of 150 companies, the Journal “found that 26% were exclusively recruiting from a shortlist of elite schools, up from 17% that were doing so in 2022.” Consider the timeframe of the evolution of corporate recruiting.
It was in October of 2023 that a tragic slaughter took place in Israel, and subsequent to it commentary about the ideological makeup of professors and students at elite U.S. universities really picked up steam. It was said amid all this that elite U.S. universities were not just breeding grounds for socialism and communism, but also antisemitism. What was said didn’t make sense.
For one, it was quickly forgotten by the critics of “elite” U.S. universities that the Jewish population at them has long been much more than robust. It raises the basic question that if antisemitism is so rampant at top U.S. schools, why are there so many Jews attending those schools? The question unearths another anecdote.
Years ago, now New York Times columnist Bret Stephens rejected a statistic showing half of female college students would be raped while at college. Stephens contended that the stat was belied by the growing population of female students at college. Stephens’s skepticism about female safety on campus logically should have but sadly didn’t reveal itself as university critics promoted the rampant antisemitism narrative at U.S. universities.
Second, if it’s true that elite U.S. universities are turning students into socialists in addition to antisemites, why is it that the world’s greatest corporations (most of them American, if valuations are to be taken seriously) continue to so aggressively recruit at those same universities? Why so assiduously recruit the very individuals out to bring your business harm?
Unless the narrative was always false. The aforementioned survey suggests it was, and is. No doubt there are antisemites and socialists at elite U.S. universities. Youth allows for a lot of stupidity.
What the critics have long missed, possibly on purpose, is that antisemitism, like socialism, is fringe thought and not indicative of the student body whole. As the Veris Insights survey revealed, corporations covet elite-educated Americans. The kids are alright.
