🇺🇸📚 Why college freshmen are heading south

This shift, it goes without saying, can’t be explained by a single new pool, even one as magical as LSU’s lazy river. Even so, the new waterway does speak to a fundamental shift in how young people conceive of what college involves. The diploma, increasingly, is a product, and colleges sell experiences, credentials — and joy. And if that offers vast opportunities for “football schools” like LSU, with their sororities and their laidback Southern charm, their more po-faced Northern cousins look set to suffer, especially if they continue to dismiss the white middle classes that used to fill their halls.

Another piece of the puzzle here is comparing how universities on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line have dealt with DEI. Right across the North, students were forced to listen to fatuous lectures on white supremacy and anti-racism. They were told to read Robin DiAngelo and Ta-Nehisi Coates. They were told to “do better” and to “do the work” and to “be a good ally”. These students were told, in short, that they were the problem, no matter what they had individually done. The privilege they enjoyed was systemic, wicked, total. Talking with several of my former students, they describe “cultural bingo” games designed to raise “awareness”. As one of my more thick-skinned former students put it: “Starting off the year being among the worst of the worst was pretty hilarious.”

Generally speaking, the South avoided such manias, even pushing back in law. In 2022, for instance, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill banning DEI across all public Florida colleges. It’s a cultural fork in the road that endures to this day. While many prestigious Northern schools featured tarp-blue “tent cities” in support of Palestinians last year, their Southern counterparts were too busy with the college football season. That’s exactly the kind of “experience” many kids dream of, with their circus-like atmosphere and kegs. Having the former, at any rate, codes weird and alienating — while the latter codes normal.

https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-college-freshmen-are-heading-south/