For this they want $40,000 a year?

My kids are a long way away from college, but the specter of paying for college (which the "elite" ones coming in at about $40,000 per year) is already starting to haunt us. The problem is that, the more I hear about American college educations, the more I have serious doubts about whether there is any benefit to my children's brains at all. I know that they'll get that all important diploma, but what will they have learned? John Zmirak tackles one part of this problem -- the vanishing American male on college campuses in this very depressing article about rampant campus feminism:

Nearly every elite campus we cover features some sort of "women's center" -- typically dominated by radical feminists or lesbians; at the same time, traditional male preserves such as fraternities are frequently under attack. At Colgate University, where a women's studies professor became president, the school in 2003 decreed that all fraternities had to close and sell their buildings to the college -- to be transformed into "diversity housing" units. Students who did not comply faced expulsion. At several colleges, highly popular male sports have been discontinued in favor of lightly attended activities for women -- in the name of complying with the federal government's intrusive "Title IX" regulation. At Wesleyan University in Connecticut -- which surely takes the cake as the most "politically correct" school in the U.S. -- students can burn off most of their distributional requirements with courses such as "Rereading Gendered Agency: Black Women's Experience of Slavery," "Questions of Queer Travel," "Problems and Methods in Queer Historiography," and "Multiculturalism and Oppression." The president of Wesleyan is pressuring all its fraternities to become co-ed, while the student government denounces single-sex dorm rooms on the grounds that "gender and biological sex are separate and distinct concepts," which means that students must be free "to define their own gender." The college-sponsored "Queer Resource Center" provides a lending library of gay porn.

I can only hope that, since my children are indeed a long way off, Wesleyan, and its ilk, will have cleaned up its act or gone out of business by the time my kids' time roles around. UPDATE: Anne, at PalmTree Pundit, is a homeschooler. Today she wrote a post reminding us that the absence of a teaching certificate isn't that signicant, because the presence of a teaching certificate may not mean what you think it does. That is, the person sitting in the teacher's chair holding the certificate may know nothing about anything. And to prove this point, Anne illustrates her post with a long quotation from someone who is often in the uncomfortable position of hiring these properly licensed ignoramuses. Talking to Technorati: Colleges, Universities, Feminism