When I grew up, attending college was a badge of honor increasingly required for career success and a widely praised life experience that helped young people become adults, fueling American prosperity.

I remember watching public-interest TV ads extolling the benefits of college and, at least implicitly, warning that a high school diploma was no longer a ticket to success.

A generation earlier, higher education was so deeply valued that Congress passed a law, the GI Bill, to reward military veterans with low-cost or even free college tuition, affordable home mortgages and other benefits.

Today, attending college faces strong headwinds. Costs have skyrocketed — to around $25,000 a year at public universities and four times as much at coveted private schools. Despite these costs, it is more challenging to gain acceptance to better colleges, thanks to Baby Boomer parents who have pushed their kids from the youngest age to do everything possible to get ahead in life. Meanwhile, we have a president who accuses professors of liberal “indoctrination” and cuts funding for academic research.

These headwinds are compelling some young people, especially young men, to delay college or eschew it altogether. Female university students increasingly outnumber male students, with many young men who skip college citing their support for Donald Trump as justification.

Colleges have experienced tumultuous periods before. In the Red Scare of the 1950s, students faced accusations, often unfounded, of being closet communists. A decade later, campuses were rocked by Vietnam War protests that sometimes turned violent, as tragically memorialized in the 1970 fatal shootings of four Kent State University students by Ohio National Guard members.

The hyper-competitiveness of college today is new. Though I had edited my high-school newspaper and earned national writing awards in a fine suburban Detroit public school, there is no way, with my B+ grade average, I could gain acceptance today to my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley.

As an academic tutor who sometimes helps high school juniors complete their college applications, I am stunned by how cutthroat applying to college has become. The University of Virginia, near where I live, is one of the country’s best public schools — but still a notch or two below the Ivy League and other private universities such as Duke or Stanford or MIT. Yet, I have seen stellar students with extraordinary extracurricular activities and community service, even those with 4.1 or 4.2 (above A) grade-point averages, get rejected at UVA.

As for Trump’s indoctrination claim, it is true that many professors, especially at the elite schools, are liberal. That is what I hear almost uniformly when folks learn that I attended Berkeley; it still has a reputation based on its location in the San Francisco area and on its history as the cradle of the 1960s student free-speech movement. Far less well-known, however, is its past as a breeding ground for spies where professors, including several of mine as a political science major, secretly recruited agents for the CIA.

The greatest professors make college worthwhile. I still remember the thrilling lectures and thought-provoking seminars of Karen Hermassi, a young political-theory professor who taught a course on Plato. She pushed back against the then-prevailing academic view of the ancient Greek philosopher as an ideological harbinger for 20th century dictators from Hitler to Mussolini.

While I came to disagree with her, her inspiring lectures helped teach me lessons that have proved invaluable in my subsequent career — challenging accepted wisdom and reading even dense texts very closely. And they taught me another lesson: However abstract it seems at the time, what you learn in the college classroom might prove more relevant than you could ever imagine. Our debates over Plato and totalitarianism seemed distant from the America I’d grown up in — the America of Jefferson and Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Today, in the America of Trump, there is no more vital debate.

That vitality has given attending college a new mission: to help save American democracy. With some of the world’s finest universities under attack from their own government, it is no longer enough merely to gain an education. Now, there is an elevated task. Young learners must model the critical role of higher education in the self-governance our Founders sought. And they must demonstrate to their countrymen that the free exchange of ideas will help us preserve our government of self-rule.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

James Rosen is a former political reporter and Pentagon correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers. He received awards from the National Press Club, Military Reporters & Editors Association, and the Society of Professional Journalists, which in 2021 named him top opinion columnist. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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