Let Colleges Fail

The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education

Richard K. Vedder

• Publisher: Independent Institute
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781598134056
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Everyone knows American universities are more expensive and less impressive than ever. But no one has come up with a plan to fix them.

No one…

Until now.

Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education is the hard-hitting instruction manual America needs in order to save its institutions of higher learning.

The solutions proposed herein are unorthodox. They’re stern. They’re tough.

To some, they might even sound utterly shocking.

But they’re bound to work.

Richard Vedder, Senior Fellow at Independent Institute and Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Ohio University, asks the forbidden question:

Why do we subsidize universities through taxpayer-provided grants and private donor gifts when the institutions are so obviously failing America’s youth?

How can we justify this special status, while businesses offering far more useful goods and services are punished by confiscatory taxes—for simply turning a well-deserved profit?

The history behind these questions is long, winding, and complicated.

But the solutions to our current crisis are not.

In fact, they’re as time-tested as the study of economics itself.

Vedder reminds Americans of the concept of “creative destruction” (famously introduced by economist Joseph Schumpeter)—the idea that, because markets threaten to reallocate resources from unproductive to productive uses by “creatively destroying” failing businesses, markets actually help failing businesses adapt to the market’s ever-changing needs and realities.

It’s sink or swim.

And in the face of necessity, most businesses—or at least, those worth their salt—learn, however painfully, to swim.

And if universities want to survive, says Vedder, they must learn to swim, too.

But because we have cushioned them from the demands, necessities, and realities of public life, American colleges are weak, woke, and unforgivably obtuse. Their eye-stretching price tag just adds insult to injury.

Read this book and discover:

• what universities can—indeed, must—learn from the profit-making private sector;
• why big government needs to get out of the student loan business yesterday … and what will happen if it refuses to do so;
• why accreditation, though infrequently questioned or critiqued, might actually be unnecessary … or even bad;
• how privatizing state universities could actually open newer and more affordable finance options;
• what a healthy voucher/scholarship arrangement could look like;
• and much, much more …

Daring in its analysis, practical in its problem-solving, and thoroughly readable in its prose, Let Colleges Fail is indispensable reading for those who want America’s colleges to thrive once again.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Higher Education Is Failing! Ten Cardinal Sins
• 2. Capitalism Succeeds by Allowing Failures via Creative Destruction
• 3. Why Are Universities Subsidized, but Firms Taxed?
• 4. Creative Destruction and Laboratories of Democracy
• 5. Recent Innovations in Higher Education: Good, but Not Enough
• 6. Reducing the Government’s Role
• 7. Reimagining Higher Education: Reducing the Federal Role
• 8. What Can State Governments Do?
• 9. Inside Job: Reforming Universities Within
• 10. Other Reforms: Thinking outside the Box
• 11. Beyond Instruction: Research and Other Activities
• 12. Conclusion: Three Key Expressions to Guide Collegiate Reform
• Notes