College As We’ve Known It Will Soon Die (And Should)

The Federal Government Should Adapt the Principles of 150 Years Ago To a New Age

To understand how public universities reached their present state of decline and near-crisis, you might look back a century and a half to July of 1862, when Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land Grant Act into law. The act, to which we can credit many of the higher-education triumphs of the United States, did not, as is sometimes believed, give states acreage upon which to build huge public universities. Instead, each state was granted rights to federal land in the western territories, the income from which would be used to …