In the wake of sexual assault allegations at Cornell University, the victimization of women on college campuses has returned to the public conversation.
Cornell’s 2025 state-mandated sexual misconduct survey reported that 35% of undergraduate women said they had experienced sexual assault since arriving at the university. The undergraduate response rate, however, was only 13%. Cornell’s presidential task force itself warned that the low response rate limits estimates and makes the results difficult to interpret.
People will sacrifice their daughters on the altar of the university for status. Imagine what else they will sacrifice.
If you take the headline number at face value, though, sending your daughter to Cornell sounds insane.
Conservative parents correctly tell a parallel story about the ideological and spiritual dangers of college. They complain that universities teach women to hate men, become atheists, sleep around, embrace progressive politics, and borrow enormous sums for degrees of dubious value. Everyone has seen the meme: a smart, pretty, well-adjusted high school graduate goes off to college and returns tattooed, purple-haired, pierced, and wearing a “down with the patriarchy” T-shirt.
Yet both sides keep sending their daughters.
The left describes campuses as rape factories. The right describes them as camps for progressive indoctrination. Still, liberal and conservative parents drill their daughters for the SAT, pack their schedules with extracurriculars, hire admissions consultants, and sweat over essays for the privilege of attending places like Cornell.
And that privilege is expensive. At 2026-2027 rates, four years of tuition at Cornell’s endowed colleges would approach $296,000 before housing, dining, books, and other expenses. New York residents in Cornell’s state contract colleges get a discount, but four years of tuition still comes to roughly $199,000.
Why would parents fight so hard for access to institutions they routinely describe as dangerous?
The easy answer is that neither side believes its own rhetoric. That is too simple. Conservatives and progressives exaggerate, but many genuinely believe the dangers they describe.
The better answer is status.
For most of American history, college was attended by a small minority. It was a finishing school for elites, a pipeline into the learned professions, and an ivory tower for scholars. Most Americans did not need a bachelor’s degree to enter respectable middle-class work.
The G.I. Bill dramatically expanded access after World War II. Federal aid and student lending expanded it further. As attendance grew, the degree increasingly became more than an education. It became a credential.
The Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. accelerated that logic. Griggs did not ban aptitude tests, as is sometimes claimed. It held that employment practices with discriminatory effects had to be justified by business necessity and job relevance. Broad employment tests became legally riskier, while a college degree became a convenient screening tool.
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That doesn’t mean Griggs single-handedly created credential inflation. It did not. But the larger phenomenon is real. Employers began requiring bachelor’s degrees for jobs that previously did not need them, turning the diploma into a proxy for intelligence, discipline, conformity, and class position.
Eventually the credential became self-reinforcing. A degree was valuable because employers demanded one, and employers demanded one because so many desirable applicants had one.
The result is familiar. Jobs once open to high school graduates now ask for bachelor’s degrees. Jobs once open to bachelor’s graduates increasingly prefer master’s degrees. The education itself may have little relationship to the work, but the credential still sorts applicants.
The economic incentive is only part of it. College has become a rite of passage for the professional class. Parents want the sweatshirt, the move-in photos, the graduation pictures, and the reassuring sense that their children have entered the respectable world. The name on the diploma matters because other people recognize it. The campus experience matters because other high-status people shared it.
A student who attends Cornell does not merely buy classes; she buys membership in a hierarchy that exists long after commencement. This is why attacks on higher education so often fail to change family behavior. Parents can hate the professors, mock the administrators, and denounce the politics while still fearing that opting out will leave their children below the people who stayed in.
College also confers something money alone cannot buy: entry into a social network.
Elite universities connect students with other ambitious, well-connected people. Fraternities, sororities, internships, fellowships, alumni networks, and campus organizations create relationships that can shape careers for decades. Even if every lecture were useless, the network would retain enormous value.
That is why parents who despise universities still want their children admitted to them.
The pressure is especially strong for daughters because women now dominate higher education. Women make up a clear majority of undergraduate enrollment and earn about 59% of bachelor’s degrees. Whatever conservatives may think about the culture of universities, telling a daughter to skip college can mean telling her to surrender access to the credentialed professional world in which many of her peers will compete.
This is the trap.
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Progressives may believe campuses expose women to unacceptable rates of sexual assault. Conservatives may believe universities corrode faith, family, and femininity. Both groups understand that status institutions control access to other status institutions.
That contradiction reveals something deeper than hypocrisy.
Status is the one commodity that is always zero-sum. People are status-seeking creatures, and institutions that confer status therefore acquire enormous political power. If Cornell can make parents compete for the privilege of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars while those same parents describe the campus as dangerous, then Cornell has something more valuable than an educational product.
It has the power to certify who belongs.
Conservatives spend enormous energy winning arguments about college. They complain about ideology, debt, useless majors, campus sex, and administrative bloat. Then they celebrate when their daughter gets into an Ivy.
That should tell them something.
People will sacrifice their daughters on the altar of the university for status. Imagine what else they will sacrifice.
If conservatives truly want to win the political battle, they should spend less time arguing with institutions that confer status and more time building institutions capable of conferring status themselves.
Higher education, Cornell 7, Sexual assault, Left wing, Ivy league, Gi bill, Conservatives, College, Opinion & analysis
