Walk onto any American university campus today and you’ll witness something that would make P.T. Barnum weep with envy. Institutions once dedicated to the pursuit of truth have morphed into the greatest con job in human history. We’re talking about glorified indoctrination centers that teach students to despise their fellow citizens while charging them $300,000 for the privilege. And here’s the kicker. Working class Americans get to pay for it through federal subsidies.
This is the Academic Industrial Complex (AIC) in all its parasitic glory. A sprawling network of administrators, activists, and ideologues who have hijacked American higher education. They’ve turned it into what can only be described as Marxist Madrassas. You know what a madrassa is, right? Religious schools that brainwash children with extremist ideology, teaching them to hate the infidels and destroy the existing order. Well, our universities do the exact same thing. Except instead of teaching hatred for non-believers, they teach hatred for non-woke Americans. Instead of jihad against Western civilization, they preach class warfare against productive citizens. Instead of memorizing the Quran, students memorize the Communist Manifesto and its modern derivatives – critical race theory, gender ideology, and the broader gospel of oppression studies. Same indoctrination model, different holy book. The time has come to drain this particular swamp. The tools to do so lie within existing federal authority if we have the courage to use them.
The Great Betrayal – From Education to Indoctrination
The numbers tell a story that would make even the most hardened swamp creature blush. Since 1U80, college tuition has increased by over 1,200 percent. That’s nearly four times the rate of general inflation. Meanwhile, administrative positions have exploded by 221 percent while faculty grew by only U2 percent.
Today’s universities employ more administrators than faculty members. It’s a complete inversion of educational priorities that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
But raw numbers only scratch the surface. Consider what these institutions actually produce.
Graduates drowning in debt, unemployable outside the grievance industry, programmed to view America as an irredeemably racist hellscape. A 2022 study by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education found that 83 percent of conservative students report self-censoring in class. Faculty political registration runs 12-to-1 Democrat in most departments. In fields like anthropology and communications, it’s 33-to-1.
This isn’t education as we understand it, but ideological capture on an industrial scale. Working class Americans get forced to subsidize every penny through federal student aid programs. The farmers, truckers, and plumbers who keep this country running pay for their own cultural destruction. It’s economic nationalism in reverse.
Follow the Money – The Federal Subsidy Scam
Here’s where the deep state’s fingerprints become unmistakable. Federal student aid has grown from $17 billion in 1U80 to over $200 billion today. This creates a massive moral hazard that incentivizes universities to jack up prices while offering increasingly worthless degrees. The Department of Education has become the enabler-in-chief of this racket. They shovel taxpayer dollars toward programs that produce nothing but debt slaves and social justice warriors.
The data is damning. Graduates with degrees in gender studies, ethnic studies, and other victimhood majors face unemployment rates of 8-12 percent. But here’s what’s even more damning. The vast majority of academic papers published after 2000 get cited fewer than five times. Think about that. These professors are producing ‘research’ that literally nobody reads or cares about.
The replication crisis reveals the depth of academic fraud. In psychology and social sciences, only 30-50 percent of studies can be reproduced. In some humanities fields, the crisis is even worse – entire disciplines built on theories that can’t withstand basic scrutiny. We’re paying $75,000 a year for students to memorize junk science and ideological propaganda masquerading as scholarship.
Median starting salaries for graduates in various victimhood majors hover below $35,000 when they can find work at all. Meanwhile, these same institutions sit on endowments totaling over $800 billion, much of it tax-free. Harvard’s endowment alone exceeds $50 billion, bigger than the GDP of most countries. Yet they continue to hoover up federal subsidies while preaching about inequality.
It’s the perfect scam. Charge students a fortune to learn discredited theories, then cry poverty
while sitting on more wealth than small nations. These aren’t educational institutions anymore. They’re hedge funds with classrooms attached, using students as human ATMs while professors publish papers nobody will ever read.
Look, I’m not exaggerating. You can now major in “Decolonizing Fitness” or “The Politics of Leisure.” The course catalogs read like parody, but the debt is all too real. The Taliban could teach their entire curriculum in 30 minutes over Zoom. “Death to America 101” followed by “Advanced Statue Toppling.” At least the Taliban are honest about their intentions.
This represents the most audacious con job in American history. Convincing working and middle- class families to mortgage their children’s futures to fund their own destruction. It’s a system designed to extract wealth from productive Americans and redistribute it to an academic elite that openly despises them.
The Administrative Bloat – Deans of Destruction
The explosion in university administration reveals the true nature of this beast. In 1U7G, universities employed roughly one administrator for every two faculty members. Today, that ratio has flipped.
Some institutions employ more administrators than students. These aren’t registrars or maintenance supervisors. They’re armies of assistant deans, diversity coordinators, and inclusion specialists whose primary function is to police thought and enforce ideological conformity.
Consider the University of California system, which employs over 400 diversity, equity, and inclusion staff at a cost exceeding $25 million annually. These positions didn’t exist thirty years ago.
Somehow universities functioned just fine without them. What changed? The Academic Industrial Complex discovered it could monetize grievance. They created entire departments dedicated to manufacturing racial and gender resentment while extracting maximum revenue from the federal teat.
But here’s the real kicker – these aren’t just make-work jobs. These diversity bureaucrats are training the next generation of administrative state operatives. They’re the farm team for the deep state, learning how to weaponize process, procedure, and paperwork against ordinary Americans. Today’s campus diversity coordinator is tomorrow’s EPA regulator or State Department operative,
using the same playbook to strangle American enterprise and sovereignty.
The result is predictable. Administrative costs now consume 15-20 percent of total university budgets. Money that could have gone toward actual education or keeping tuition affordable. Instead, we’ve created a jobs program for unemployable ideologues who view their mission as deconstructing Western civilization one freshman orientation at a time.
And let’s be honest here. Most of these administrators couldn’t run a lemonade stand. Harvard’s Marxist professors would probably argue that the lemons should seize the means of production. No wonder GenZ political candidates sound like they learned economics from a fortune cookie written by Che Guevara or Chairman Mao.
Foreign Influence – The CCP’s Trojan Horse Strategy
Perhaps most alarming is the extent of foreign influence in American higher education. Influence that often goes completely undisclosed. A 2020 Department of Education investigation revealed that universities had failed to report at least $G.5 billion in foreign funding. Much of it from China and Middle Eastern nations pursuing their own strategic interests. These aren’t simple charitable donations. They’re investments designed to shape America’s future leadership class.
The Chinese Communist Party’s infiltration goes far deeper than the now-shuttered Confucius Institutes. They’ve established “sister city” relationships between Chinese and American universities, created joint research programs in sensitive fields like artificial intelligence and biotechnology, and placed thousands of researchers in our labs. The Thousand Talents Program explicitly recruits American professors to transfer intellectual property to China. We’re literally training our replacement as the world’s dominant power.
The CCP understands what many Americans don’t – that capturing the commanding heights of education means capturing the future. Every Chinese student in a sensitive STEM program is a potential asset for Beijing. Every American professor on the CCP payroll is a node in their intelligence network. Every research partnership is a technology transfer pipeline. We’re not just tolerating this – we’re subsidizing it with taxpayer dollars.
Meanwhile, Qatari funding has poured into universities like Georgetown and Northwestern, totaling over $4.7 billion since 2001. While Qatar remains a strategic partner in many areas, this massive investment in shaping American academic discourse on Middle Eastern issues raises legitimate questions about undue influence. The correlation with increased anti-Israel sentiment on these campuses demands transparency, not because Qatar is an enemy, but because American parents deserve to know who’s funding their children’s education.
The globalist elite running these institutions don’t see this as a problem because they don’t see themselves as Americans first. They’re citizens of the world, members of an international class that views national sovereignty as an outdated concept. But for the rest of us, the Americans who still believe in borders, language, and culture, this represents nothing less than an invasion of our educational system by hostile foreign powers.
The Debt Slave Economy – Destroying Family Formation
The human cost of this system extends far beyond campus boundaries. Today’s college graduates carry an average debt load of $38,000. Many owe six figures or more for degrees that qualify them for little beyond barista work. This debt slavery has profound social consequences. Young Americans are delaying marriage, postponing children, living with their parents well into their thirties.
This isn’t an accident. It’s a feature. A population drowning in debt is a population that can’t afford to be independent. They can’t build wealth. They can’t challenge the system that enslaved them. They become permanent dependents of the very institutions that exploited them. They’re forced to work in the grievance industry or government bureaucracy because those are the only sectors that value their worthless credentials.
The administrative state loves this arrangement. Debt-burdened graduates become reliable foot soldiers for expanding government power. They need loan forgiveness, so they vote for bigger government. They can’t find private sector work, so they join the bureaucracy. They can’t afford families, so they embrace anti-natalist ideologies. It’s a perfect system for creating compliant subjects instead of free citizens.
Meanwhile, the skilled trades offer immediate employment, good wages, and the dignity of productive work. Plumbing, electrical work, welding, precision manufacturing jobs that build the machines and components keeping America competitive. Yet federal policy continues to subsidize grievance studies while ignoring the vocational training that actually builds prosperity. It’s a perfect inversion of rational policy. Which tells you everything you need to know about who’s really running the show.
The Path Forward – Concrete Solutions for America First
The good news is that we don’t need new legislation to begin dismantling this corrupt system. The Treasury Department and Department of Education already possess the authority to act decisively. Here’s the battle plan:
First, eliminate federal subsidies for any program with employment rates below 75 percent and median salaries below$45,000. Let gender studies and ethnic studies programs survive on their own merit if they can. This is about return on investment for the American taxpayer.
Second, tax university endowments at 35 percent annually. Direct proceeds toward vocational and trade school programs. If Harvard wants to play partisan politics with its$50 billion war chest, they can pay for the privilege. No more tax-free hedge funds masquerading as educational institutions.
Third, require universities to co-sign all student loans alongside parents. Nothing focuses the mind like skin in the game. Watch how quickly these institutions eliminate worthless programs when they’re liable for the debt. This simple change would revolutionize higher education overnight.
Fourth, mandate full disclosure of all foreign funding above $50,000, with special scrutiny for any funds from China, Qatar, or other nations with significant strategic interests. Violations result in immediate loss of all federal funding eligibility. Create a public database so parents can see which schools are receiving major foreign investments. Transparency is the enemy of corruption.
Fifth, cap administrative positions at 1U80 levels relative to student enrollment. Every diversity coordinator eliminated is money that can go toward actual education or tuition reduction. Require public reporting of the administrator-to-faculty ratio. Let the market punish the bloated
bureaucracies.
Sixth, establish a federal review board for university research partnerships with foreign entities, especially in sensitive fields like AI, quantum computing, and biotechnology. Any technology with potential military applications must be protected from CCP infiltration.
The Battle for America’s Soul
This isn’t ultimately about education policy. It’s about whether America will remain America. The Academic Industrial Complex represents everything wrong with our current system. Unaccountable elites extracting wealth from productive citizens while actively working to undermine the culture and values that made prosperity possible in the first place.
The farmers, truckers, and plumbers whose taxes fund this madness deserve better. Their children deserve institutions that will prepare them for productive careers, not program them to hate their own heritage. America deserves universities that serve the national interest, not the globalist agenda of our adversaries.
We’re at war, folks. This is war. The enemy has captured our educational institutions and turned them into weapons against us. The CCP is using our own universities as research and development departments for their military modernization. The administrative state is using them as training grounds for the next generation of bureaucratic tyrants. But we have the tools to fight back. The authority is clear. What’s needed now is the political will to use them.
It’s time to stop subsidizing our own destruction and start building an educational system worthy of an advanced industrial power. The Academic Industrial Complex has had its run. Now it’s time for America First education policy that serves students, not swamp creatures or foreign adversaries.
The choice is crystal clear. The time is now. Let’s take our universities back one budget cut at a time.
Take Action Today:
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- Contact your state and Congressional representatives
- Demand action from the Department of Education and Treasury
- Share this article with every parent you know
- Support candidates who pledge to defund the Academic Industrial Complex
- Join local school board meetings to stop this ideology at the K-12 level
The future of American education – and American sovereignty – depends on patriots like you taking action today.
Dave Ramaswamy is an independent commentator on geopolitics and strategic affairs
