eOpicle

I used to think college was the closest thing America had to a sacred institution. Not church-sacred, obviously—we stopped believing in those a while ago—but culturally sacred. The kind of place you defend reflexively at dinner parties. The kind of place people gesture toward when they say things like, “Well, education is the answer,” as if that sentence still means something specific. Then I read about a Yale report basically saying, in polite academic language, “Yeah… we might be the problem.” And I had to sit down. Not because it was shocking. No, nothing about higher education dysfunction is shocking anymore. Tuition looks like a phone number, student debt feels like a generational hazing ritual, and degrees increasingly function like participation trophies with interest rates. What hit me wasn’t the conclusion—it was the audacity of elite academia finally turning the mirror inward and going, “Huh. Maybe we did this.” You don’t say. The System That Accidentally Ate Itself Le...