Colleges are increasingly just political echo chambers with beer and thats putting our democracy at risk

Why go to college to expand your views, when you can spend four years in an echo chamber canceling all dissenters? Sociology professor Neil Gross explores why more and more kids are choosing the latter option — and putting our democracy as we know it at risk — in his aptly titled book, “What Happened to College?:  How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It” (Avid Reader Press), out today.“The restructuring of undergraduate life along political lines is at the core of the current crisis,” he argues.“When everything becomes political, life just loses some of its value and some of its richness.”Writing from inside the ivory tower at Colby College in Maine, Gross argues that the fundamental problem with higher ed is that politics “has become the central organizing principle of the undergraduate experience,” dictating how students choose classes, friends, clubs, partners and even majors.But the professor told The Post that the issue starts even earlier, when students decide to “self-segregate by political affiliation” when they choose which colleges to apply to.

According to his polling data, a full half of undergraduates are assessing “political fit” when looking at colleges.Some kids, Gross found when researching the book, are seeking out schools, like Oberlin and Barnard, with a reputation for student activism, while others are looking for apolitical campuses where they can have fun.Increasingly, he’s also hearing about girls boycotting schools in states with abortion bans, too.The colleges themselves are making the political polarization worse as they’ve “really leaned into” their reputations by marketing themselves to students of a particular political stripe.Gross notes how colleges employ “subtle messaging” on school tours and in brochures — celebrating certain guest speakers and alumni — to convey their leanings.

More explicitly, UC Berkeley’s undergraduate admissions page celebrates its histo...