Professors do lean left. The best evidence finds no sign that they convert their students. The skew is mostly self-selection, students have minds of their own, and the indoctrination complaint insults the critical thinking college exists to build. A 1980 Baruch classroom, and the 2026 evidence that backs it.
A viral post did the math on MIT’s admissions by sex and got it right. The trouble is what the math assumed. Who applies tells you who was interested, not who was qualified. The fair test is how a class was chosen.
The system says a bachelor’s degree means $1.2 million more in median lifetime earnings. A New York Times essay says business school, one of the biggest parts of higher education, should be abolished. They can’t both be right. They can both be wrong, in the same way: each reads research from too high up, and the student at the margin stands to pay for a finding about someone else.
In 1982, In Search of Excellence studied only what it called America’s best-run companies. When an analyst checked the worst, the winners’ record proved no guide to what came next. The $1.2 million college pitch makes the same mistake. It leaves out the students who enrolled, borrowed and left without a degree. Did anyone check the failures?
The Wall Street Journal spent fourteen years testing stock pickers against darts, and more than two decades of fund scoreboards show nearly nine in ten large-cap funds trailing the plain index over fifteen years. The same belief is reassembling around AI: predictive language models read as insight engines, and for most uses there is no scoreboard. Same error, new tape. Here is the test that would settle it, and the reason its result will not.
College is a bet, and in my experience few families are shown the odds. Count the students who have not finished and the graduates working below their degree, and the average student’s odds come to roughly two in five.