Purdue University
Letter from University president Mitch Daniels 

“There’s a tsunami coming” 

This quote from Stanford President John Hennessy was one of many comments presented to the students and faculty in an Open Letter from Purdue University President Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. 

Daniels was referring to college education as we know it today. In his letter he noted that student debt has soared past the $1 trillion mark, more than the total credit card debt. He said that some “insiders” have noted that in 50 years half of the nation’s 4,500 colleges and universities will have ceased to exist and that residential college will become largely obsolete. 

Here are some other points he made in his letter: 

• College costs too much and delivers too little. Students are leaving, when they graduate at all, with loads of debt but without evidence that they grew much in either knowledge or critical thinking. 

• Administrative costs, splurging on “resort” amenities, and an obsession with expensive capital projects have run up the cost to students without enhancing the value of the education they receive. 

• Rigor has weakened. Grade inflation has drained the meaning from grade point averages and left the diploma in many cases as merely a surrogate marker for the intelligence required to gain admission in the first place. 

• The system lacks accountability for results. No one can tell if one school is performing any better than another. 

• The mission of undergraduate instruction is increasingly subordinated to research and to work with graduate students. 

• Too many professors are spending too much time “writing papers for each other,” researching abstruse topics of no real utility and no real incremental contribution to human knowledge or understanding. 

• Diversity is prized except in the most important realm of all, diversity of thought. The academies that, through the unique system of tenure, once enshrined freedom of opinion and inquiry now frequently are home to the narrowest sort of closed‐mindedness and the worst repression of dissident ideas. 

• Athletics, particularly in NCAA Division I, is out of control both financially and as a priority of university attention. 

Read the entire letter in pdf format here