The Ivy-Industrial Complex Part I: A Gentle Introduction

Note: This article is the start of a series of essays by the author to be published in the following weeks.

The Ivory Tower is tilting. The sun is finally shining through the long shadow that it has cast across America. As the country is locked in their houses, wondering if the outside has been turned into a Mad Max hellscape, higher education is in a breath-holding contest, hoping that someone else gasps first. 

To the Twenty-First Century upper-middle-class American mind, any college with slightly above-average architecture is equated with Hogwarts. The Big Magic of higher education mystically makes every student smarter just by walking through one of these architecturally sound institutions (okay, maybe not at Dartmouth). This selling point has been a boon for higher education. From 2000 to 2017, the number of students in postsecondary education increased by 27 percent, and the cost of college has increased to eight times that of the average wage. This time has been one of great prosperity for the Ivy industry. For one example, Harvard’s endowment has doubled, increasing by over 20 billion dollars since the turn of the century. 

However, with the harsh economic realities of the Covid setting in, the money at Gringotts seems to be drying up. Furloughs and cutbacks have already started across the country, and the uncertainty around the fall term should only be more cause for concern. 

At Dartmouth, the incomprehensible messaging of the three-parent household—Helble, Lively, and Hanlon—has left everyone dazed and confused. “Why is tuition the same?” “There is no way you can convince me that you are poor with a 5-billion-dollar endowment.” “Well, I guess a Credit/No Credit term is enough to bribe me to get my parents (or my future self) to pay 70k to occasionally attend a zoom call.” While the students of Dartmouth might not believe that the college is poor, it does seem that there might be a chance that the college has a slight cash flow problem, a problem they share with the rest of higher education currently. 

Let’s play a game. I’m going to list the qualities of a mystery institution and you try to guess what it is. 

• You pay money to gain credits
• Each credit equates to secretly-gained knowledge 
• The more credits you have, the more you advanced in the systems
• Eventually, if you gain enough credits, you can graduate on to another, higher system 
• If you criticize or hold views counter to the system, you are cast out of the system
• The system is reliant on a constant influx of new members, bringing in a constant flow of money
• The system’s authority is granted by an ancient tradition and social custom that determine if the young are worthy to venture into the land of adulthood

Well, what is the institution? Your new local cult? Possibly Scientology? Maybe a Pay-to-win Mobile Game? What about a new finagled dairy futures investment strategy? No, this mystery institution is higher education, especially the highest of higher education. The sole system left in this country that we think every person should desire to be a part of, The American Religion if you will. We got rid of the cool robes and ancient languages because it was too on-point, but we kept the underlying puritanical aspirations that is ready to run heretics out of town at just a moment’s notice with torches and pitchforks and all (okay, maybe just accusations of racism). 

If there is anything Covid has made clear, it is that higher education is run like all other well-functioning industries. That’s right, all of higher education is one giant Ponzi scheme (with some slight religious undertones to complement). 

Writing in City Journal, Heather Mac Donald has astutely pointed out this fact. Every Ponzi scheme has a profiteer, and colleges’ ones are administrators. The single largest reason for the bloating of college prices is the growth of administrators. Everyone knows it (even Huffpo writes about it), but no one wants to admit it. Forcing teenagers to indebt themselves to pay for bureaucrats is cruel, telling them that it is racist to question the growth of these Diversocrats is evil. The education-industrial complex has created a cruel, malicious system that morally and socially guilts teenagers to participate.

The formation of this Ponzi scheme and the malicious blackmail tactic used to maintain it is only one facet of the decay of higher education into what I call the Ivy-Industrial Complex. In the coming weeks, a series of essays will explore this institution, in an attempt to try to combat and explain some of the malicious undercurrents of the system.