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Wednesday, November 20, 2024
7:00 p.m.

School’s Out Forever

Triple Canopy
264 Canal Street, 3W
New York, New York

This event is free. Seating is limited. First-come, first-seated.

The Baffler is pleased to present a panel discussion on the future of college education in America.

Nationwide, nearly half of Americans hold a college degree, while a slim majority hold a degree, certification, certificate, or other postsecondary credential. While these numbers have been steadily rising alongside college enrollment, Americans are losing faith in college; a 2023 Gallup poll found that only 36 percent of Americans had “a great deal” or ”quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, down from 57 percent in 2015. Alongside this waning faith in college, a long-term decline in fertility rates likely means shrinking class sizes and even closures for many American universities.

Higher education, meanwhile, is the target of political calls for either dismantlement or overhaul; affirmative action is outlawed; protests and crackdowns roil campuses; and the student debt crisis continues unabated. The reelection of Donald Trump—who won the majority of non-college degree holders—portends still greater turmoil. Incoming Vice President J. D. Vance has called college professors “the enemy”; Trump himself has threatened to eliminate the Department of Education and reverse Title IX protections for transgender students. A Republican-controlled National Labor Relations Board bodes poorly for a recently resurgent campus unionism.

In a conversation moderated by Dennis M. Hogan, Erik Baker, Lilah Burke, and Chenjerai Kumanyika will consider these developments against the backdrop of larger demographic changes that have so far seemed to favor Trump’s growing coalition. As the United States grows more diverse, the dream of universal college attainment seems to be slipping out of reach for the average American. Can colleges and universities find a way to beat the odds and grow—and, in the process, remake their troubled reputations? Or will American higher education, once the world leader, be doomed to decadence, decline, and a ruthless competition to rule amid the ruins?

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    Dennis M. Hogan is a writer, academic, and organizer based in Providence, RI. He is the Higher Education section editor of Public Books, and his writing has appeared in Full Stop, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Fabrikzeitung, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Forge. 

    Erik Baker teaches the history of science and capitalism at Harvard University. He is an associate editor of The Drift. In addition to The Baffler, his essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Nation, and n+1. His first book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, comes out in January from Harvard University Press.

    Lilah Burke is a freelance reporter from New York. Her writing on higher education has appeared in more than a dozen publications, including the Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the Washington Post. She was previously a reporter at Inside Higher Ed.

    Chenjerai Kumanyika is an assistant professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He has written in scholarly and public-facing venues such as The Intercept, Transom, and Hammer and Hope. Kumanyika is also the co-creator, co-executive producer, and cohost of Uncivil, Gimlet Media’s podcast on the Civil War.