Victor Davis Hanson: Universities Breed ‘Woke and Broke’ Graduates

Conservative writer Victor Davis Hanson is concerned about the quality of college graduates being produced by American universities and colleges in the modern era, who he describes as “woke and broke.”

Writing for National Review, Victor Davis Hanson made the case that American colleges are producing “woke and broke” graduates.

Hanson points out that Americans that have graduated from college since the year 2000 have both lower rates of patriotism and home ownership. Recent college graduates are often ill-informed on American history. Hanson believes that colleges and universities are to blame for this recent wave of low-skilled and anti-American graduates.

Hanson argues that American colleges don’t even give their students an opportunity to engage with conservative ideas. According to Hanson, administrators and leftist activists ensure that dissenters on hot-button issues are quickly shamed or removed from campus.

No wonder that certain issues — abortion, global warming, illegal immigration — are mostly off-limits to campus disagreement. Safe spaces, racial theme houses, and censorship have replaced the 1960s ideals of unfettered free speech and racial and ethnic integration and assimilation. Today’s students often combine the worst traits of bullying and cowardice. They are quite ready as a mob to dish it out against unorthodox individuals, and yet they’re suddenly quite vulnerable and childlike when warned to lighten up about Halloween costumes or a passage in Huckleberry Finn. The 19-year-old student is suddenly sexually mature, a Bohemian, a cosmopolitês when appetites call — only to revert to Victorian prudery and furor upon discovering that callousness, hurt, and rejection are tragically integral to crude promiscuity and sexual congress without love.

Hanson argued that many students have irresponsibly taken on massive student loan debt in order to enroll in degree programs that will not lead them on the path towards a lucrative career. As a result, according to Hanson, students end up joining groups like Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street, as an outlet for their financial frustrations.

The net result is a current generation that owes $1.6 trillion in college loans to the federal government. And that debt is now affecting the entire country, including those who never went to college, who as taxpayers eventually may be asked to forgive some if not all the debt. An entire generation of Americans has costly degrees; many cannot use them to find well-paying jobs, and they increasingly forgo or delay marriage, child-rearing, and buying a car or home until their mid-twenties or thirties. All that pretty much sums up the profile of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street adherents — or the environmental-studies major who is shocked that a skilled electrician makes three times more than he does.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more campus updates.