An unfortunate miscalculation of capital.
In this century a slew of painful writings threw light on what's been happening to education. Among them Unmaking the Public University (2011) by Christopher Newfield, Fall of the Faculty (2011) by Benjamin Ginsberg, Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education (2019) by Henry Giroux and of course John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down (2002). Together, I think these give an accurate account, at least as far as I've seen things as a professor these past 30 years.
What I now see as a cybersecurity practitioner, is that Western society has scored a spectacular own goal through a profound miscalculation. We're running out of capable people who can operate, protect and maintain the technical infrastructure we're now entirely dependent upon. It is not a problem that can be solved by immigration or global remote labour. It isn't a problem that "AI" can solve. This puts us in a precarious defence position.
An assault on education, designed to curb it's democratising influence, began arguably with Powell's famous 1971 memorandum decrying the "Attack on American Free Enterprise System", and an influential 1975 paper on The Crisis of Democracy by The Trilateral Commission. These right-wing ideas were a reaction to the culture of the 1960s, to civil rights, anti-war, feminism, and free speech which increasingly criticised capitalism and its effect on the environment. Ironically the attack harmed not only the arts, but technical skills too. Though this creed started in the United States it spread into British culture from the late 1980s, but less so into Europe. Indeed the prominent systems and quality theorist W. E. Deming called it the "American disease", criticising what today we'd broadly term 'cost-cutting efficiency' as the cause of plummeting quality.
