Last week, I participated in the Hillsdale College Free Market Forum, a gathering of talents from academics and business. It was really a splendid event, with excellent speakers and quite an array of extraordinary people among the audience. I thank Hillsdale for asking me to speak at the event. After decades of laboring in obscurity, this has really become Hillsdale’s moment. They have stepped up to their role admirably, with a standard of excellence (displayed with their online courses for example) that really shows, in comparison, how dismal most education has become these days. This is not a matter of big promises and mediocre-or-worse execution, as you get with most colleges — rather, the execution is often better than even hopeful expectations.
Among other things, Hillsdale has been busy starting a string of affiliated K-12 academies, and as you can imagine they have been very popular. This is accompanied by a lot of online resources, for homeschoolers and others in the K-12 range. This includes a whole curriculum for grades 6-12, the 1776 Curriculum.
K-12 education resources from Hillsdale College
I talked with some Hillsdale people about also expanding into new undergraduate colleges, especially since college campuses have been coming up for sale for very attractive prices these days. They said that they have even been offered some campuses to take over. The main difficulty is apparently finding professors that fit Hillsdale’s model. I think this may reflect the difficulty of imitating the “Hillsdale model,” that I remarked on earlier. It is not easy to find fifty good professors from a dead start, with which to construct a whole series of Departments in the Prussian University model, with a dozen different Majors. Rather, they should look into starting with five good professors who, between them, can teach a unified program, or basically one Major. It is not very hard to find five professors, and sixty students. Then do the same the next year, with five more professors and sixty more students. You could also have different unified Majors at different colleges, which is basically how Oxford is structured.
Apparently, the acceptance rate for Hillsdale’s undergraduate program for this year was about 20%. This is great, as Hillsdale should really be more popular even than it is; and consequently, be as exclusive as Yale. However, this also means that 80% of the applicants, who wanted a Hillsdale education, have nowhere else to go.
Here is my presentation from the event. I write these to be effective as standalone items, without the need for an accompanying voiceover.
