Time to Put a Fork in College

Time to Put a Fork in College By Spyridon Andrews

In 2001, a famed epidemiologist at Imperial College produced infectious disease models that significantly influenced policy—leading, reportedly, to the culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the foot-and-mouth outbreak. His warnings were dire: he projected as many as 150,000 human deaths. His model was off by approximately 149,800.

But he wasn’t done. A few years later, he warned that mad cow disease might kill 50,000 people. The actual number? Closer to 180.

The same “expert” returned again during COVID. In any other profession, repeated catastrophic error would end your career. But not in the Ivory Tower, where fantasy and reality are fused into a bureaucratic fog.

In this instance, his COVID model projected 2.2 million U.S. deaths absent intervention. That model shaped global lockdown policy. It was never peer-reviewed—yet it was implemented at scale. The results? Lost education, shuttered businesses, ruined lives, suicides, and a collapse in public trust.

But the poster child of academic delusion was Y2K. Those who lived through it remember the endless corporate meetings, the trillion-dollar panic, and the certain end of the world. Nothing happened. Consultants and academic “experts” laughed all the way to the bank.

Then there are the economists—those credentialed seers of nothing. The kind who sit on university boards before migrating to the Federal Reserve. From Greenspan to Krugman, we’ve watched one confident mistake after another. The Oracle at Delphi had a better track record than these guys.

In the modern university, opinion becomes “science,” and conclusions come first—long before the research. Science becomes scientism. Experts become a priesthood: cloaked in jargon, insulated from reality, answerable to no one. The DOGE leaks made clear that much academic “research” is paid for in advance—bought and shaped by those who need the right kind of answer.

If these fantasies were harmless, that would be one thing. But they’re not. Today, a four-year public degree costs an average of $104,000. At a private college, it’s $223,000. Student loan debt has soared past $1.77 trillion. The average graduate carries $38,000 in debt—often for a degree that leads nowhere. More than 40% are underemployed. Nearly one in three never finish.

Parents work hard to send their kids to ideological playgrounds run by postmodern monastics with no connection to the real world. Universities were once places for the contemplation of truth—for training theologians, lawyers, and later, Renaissance men and women of virtue. Today, they are populated by dogmatic nihilists who don’t even believe in reason. Elite professors now lecture us that “math is oppression” and “all sex is rape.” At $75,000 a year, college has become the imprinting of the naïve by the deranged.

College no longer prepares students for life—it insulates them from it. They could be learning trades, building companies, mastering languages, or serving others. Instead, they leave more fragile, more confused, and less capable than when they arrived. They lack not only skills in literacy, math, or science—but any sense of duty, humility, or virtue. The West’s classical ideals are no longer taught; they are condemned as oppressive.

Look at the new political class emerging from elite universities. A recent mayoral candidate in New York embodies the disease: no job experience, no economic understanding, and an Everest-sized sense of entitlement. Multiply him by thousands, and you get a generation convinced their degree is a license for moral superiority and misguided activism.

We need to remember that the university’s postwar expansion wasn’t born of love for learning. It was born of fear. During Vietnam, college became a means of draft avoidance. Upper-middle-class students flocked to dorms while working-class boys were sent to die. That moment birthed the elitist moral rot that now drips from our campuses. As such, the modern university wasn’t forged in duty—but in evasion. It is not a sanctuary of truth, but a fortress of avoidance—built to shield its stewards from pragmatic action or consequence.

Even the “preppy” aristocratic dream of “finding your future spouse” is dead. College is now the epicenter of hookup culture—alcohol, apps, and ideologies divorced from reason. It no longer cultivates gentlemen or ladies. It breeds loneliness, dysfunction, and disillusionment.

I want to be clear: I am not calling for reform. I am calling for burial. The American university is not outdated—it’s malignant. A horse-drawn carriage of refuse in an era of AI and Ferraris. Its defenders speak of legacy, but more likely history will remember the damage.

These days universities do virtually nothing well. Their jazz courses, something especially dear to me, sterilize and devolve an exciting music into scale drills and harmonic prison. Their literature courses make students hate literature. Their language programs can’t produce fluent speakers.

Universities have long been cloisters of backwardness. In the 12th century, Scholasticism became orthodoxy, and universities turned against the Renaissance. They ridiculed those reviving Greek texts while clinging to mistranslations. This tradition of arrogance continued through the centuries. Ignaz Semmelweis, who suggested handwashing before childbirth, was ridiculed, denied tenure, and died beaten to death in an asylum.

Today, researchers who challenge DEI dogma or postmodern ideology face cancellation—not rebuttal. Academic freedom is an empty slogan. In reality, there are better, cheaper ways to learn everything the university pretends to teach—without the indoctrination or the debt. We are blessed to have literally tens of thousands of excellent teachers throughout the globe who can use our new technology to create something new, far more effective and even thrilling.

Plato didn’t need Harvard and he would have likely been horrified at its curriculum. Aristotle’s laboratory was the observation of real life. Bruni, Montesquieu, and Jefferson drew their political science from lived experience, not an angry professor wearing hush puppies. The only ideology ever truly birthed in the university was Marxism—and because of its disconnectedness, it gave us gulags, not progress.

I am a lover of lifetime education, as are millions of people. But real education usually flourishes outside the walls of universities—walls that now stifle inquiry and reward conformity. The lower schools babysit; the colleges indoctrinate. It’s time for something new and in the real spirit of progress and inquiry.

Let the American spirit of innovation solve the problem of educating the next generations. College is done. Put a fork in it.

Spyridon Andrews is a Greek-American writer, lawyer, and jazz musician who splits his time between Los Angeles and Italy. He has been a highly sought-after defense attorney, securities expert and public speaker over the years. While not practicing law, writing or playing music, he spends time with his beautiful wife Rachel of 40 plus years, his two wonderful children Jake and Lucy, and his Pomeranians Milo and Shorty.