Book Review: What Happened to College?

A decade after his landmark book on faculty politics, Neil Gross decided it was time to give those with the most at stake a chance to speak for themselves. Beginning in the spring of 2024, he launched a massive investigation into how our polarized politics have remade the college experience, interviewing students across the country and polling thousands more. He looked at liberal arts colleges, state schools, faith-based institutions, and elite universities and combed through studies tracking everything from campus dating habits to changes in syllabi.

What he found was startling: Undergraduates today are choosing their schools, their friends, their partners, their activities—even their majors—on the basis of their political beliefs to a degree unimaginable ten years ago, with the goal of interacting as little as possible with anyone whose views don’t line up with their own. Popular campus dating apps invite you to swipe left if you don’t like someone’s political profile—a metaphor for today’s college experience writ large. Instead of resisting this trend, some faculty and administrators encouraged it, creating a cloistered environment where students could avoid uncomfortable disagreement.

What Happened to College? : How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It by Neil Gross will be published August 25, 2026. Avid Reader Press provided an early galley for review.

When I was in college in the mid-80's, politics was not on my radar at all. One of the things I relished about my college experience was meeting and interacting with people who were different with me, who held differing views and opinions. It was about exposure to ideas. I have heard the recent news stories about how at this point in the 21st Century that college campuses are fundamentally becoming more and more politically insular, so this seemed like a timely book to read.

Gross presents a lot of data in a very manageable manner. I appreciated how he supported the numbers with actual student experiences collected over interviews from all places in the cultural and politcal spectrums. Some of this I had heard; some of this was very new and eye-opening.

For those interested in college life in the US and do not have connections to students currently enrolled, this is a good look into the current state of that world.