Republicans have been all over the airwaves lately denouncing Joe Biden’s debt cancellation plan. When they appear on TV, they tend to describe a fantasy version of our college system, which they imagine as awash in “Lesbian Dance Theory” majors who can’t get a job when they graduate.

In the GOP fever dream, every college student is in their sixth year at Middlebury, racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for a useless degree. After they graduate, they’re going to move to an expensive coastal city, fail to get a job, spend all their money on avocado toast and fancy coffee, and ask hardworking “real Americans” to foot the bill when they’re done.

The American right has turned against college in the last decade. Pew polling found that around 2016 (just a coincidence, I’m sure), Republicans flipped from mostly believing that college has a positive impact on society to mostly believing that it’s negative. By 2019, close to 60% of conservatives thought that college was bad for America.

The irony of all this is that Republicans have mostly won the college wars; the institutions and students they demonize don’t exist much anymore — if they ever did.

What are Republicans’ goals for the American college system? It seems to me that they’ve wanted higher education to primarily be about making students into efficient little workers rather than free thinkers. They’ve also pushed for college to have less government support, making it less available to everyone. And guess what — they’ve won both of those battles.

First, at least since Ronald Reagan was governor of California, Republicans have wanted higher education to be about one thing — preparing students for the workforce. I wrote about this topic at greater length here, so I won’t repeat myself too much — but ever since left-wing students threatened the national status quo in the 1960s, Republicans have maintained that the purpose of college is increasing your earnings, not improving yourself as a human being.

Though Republican politicians routinely characterize college kids as flaky radicals who are studying “useless” subjects (here’s the Wall Street Journal doing it very recently), the GOP’s priorities have mostly won out over the last few decades. According to Forbes, here are the five majors that lost the most students between 2010 and 2020, with the decline in the number of students majoring in each subject:

Education — 16,230

English Language/Literature- 15,193

Social Sciences and History — 11,618

Foreign Languages — 5,202

Liberal Arts/Humanities — 4,060

And here are the majors that picked up the most students, with the increase in each:

Health Professions — 127,659

Computer/Information Sciences — 57,454

Engineering — 55,675

Biology/Biomedical Sciences — 40,199

Business — 29,732

It seems that, after decades of being told by Republicans to “learn to code” or at least choose a major that will train them directly for a vocation, American students are listening. A full 20% of students now major in STEM fields, and almost as many major in business.

Even in fields like the social sciences, students tend to take more job-oriented courses — for example, many who might have considered a history major a few decades ago are now choosing something like economics, which seems more likely to lead directly to a job.

Colleges may be offering more “woke” courses with a radical agenda, but it doesn’t seem like anyone is taking them — the students are all taking Intro to Accounting instead.

The other priority for the American right has been to defund public universities. You’d think the GOP would love big public colleges since they seem to believe that small liberal arts colleges are a cancer on the nation, but defunding public college has been a clear priority of the party for decades.

It seems that any time there’s economic trouble, right-leaning states use that as an opportunity to cut funding for public college. During the Great Recession, Louisiana (with then-presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal as governor) cut state support for university expenses from 60% of the colleges’ budget to 25%. Other states with bright-red state legislatures — Wisconsin, Kansas, and North Carolina — did something similar. In 2015, Sean McElwee and Robbie Hiltonsmith wrote about a study that found that:

when Republicans take over governors mansions they reduce spending on higher education by $0.23 per $1,000 in personal income (a measure of the state’s total tax base). Each 1 percent increase in the number of Republicans in the legislature leads to a $0.05 decrease. Given that the average spending on higher education across all states in 2014 was $5.47 per $1,000, the effect is large.

These budget cuts have caused public college tuition and fees to grow at a staggering rate. Though private college costs have gone up 124% in the last two decades, the cost of public college has increased 179% — a 9% yearly increase! In 1970, a year of public college tuition cost $2,440; now, it costs $9,349, and that’s not even accounting for the often steeper rise in room and board.

This is a great victory for Republicans who have wanted to slash public funding for college and put the financial burden on students and their families. Well done!

In many ways, Republicans have created the college system they always wanted. College is expensive and exclusionary. Because of the high cost and our national money-is-everything ideology, students are choosing vocational majors more than ever.

So what are they afraid of? It is true that new cultural norms around race, gender, and sexuality have taken root in college. Many universities have spent a lot of time and money (which, let’s be clear, has helped to increase the price tag) hiring administrators and counselors whose very job descriptions reinforce liberal social norms. But are these a case of colleges indoctrinating their students, or are all of these new positions like colleges’ rock climbing walls and fancier dining halls — i.e., amenities that are likely to attract students who already possess such views?

Maybe Republicans simply can’t understand why young, educated people are fleeing their party. In recent elections, voters have sorted themselves more than ever by education — Democrats are becoming the party of the educated, and Republicans are becoming the party of the uneducated.

Rather than think critically about why educated people might not be interested in a political party that traffics in wild conspiracy theories and lies, it seems that Republicans would rather demonize college.

Or perhaps the Republican stereotype of colleges and college students as irredeemably woke and economically useless is just an incredibly useful bogeyman for the party. As the Republican Party sheds college-educated and young voters, it finds itself with a base that has no idea what college is like today. This allows politicians to just make up their own image of college and use it as a political pinata. It’s irrelevant whether or not that image is true.

Republicans may gain political advantage from waging a war against a mostly fictional version of our colleges — but we shouldn’t forget that they’ve actually won most of the battles.

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