Politics & Power Quote by Charles Vest

Vest is taking aim at a peculiarly American habit: treating education like a stock pick that has to “beat the market” every quarter. The line is calibrated to sound reasonable, even managerial, then quietly indicts the mindset behind it. “Over-reliance” is the tell. He is not denying that education has economic value; he is warning that when dollars become the only admissible language, everything else gets demoted to hobby status.

The phrasing “strictly economic justifications” sketches the kind of argument he’s pushing back against: STEM as a jobs pipeline, universities as workforce vendors, humanities as indulgence. The damage he names is not abstract. “Quality and range” are twin casualties of market logic: quality declines when institutions optimize for measurable outputs (completion rates, immediate earnings) rather than deep learning; range narrows when programs that don’t map cleanly onto short-term labor demand get cut, marginalized, or forced to masquerade as “skills training” to survive.

“Already begun” adds urgency and blame. This isn’t a hypothetical slippery slope; it’s a trend in motion, fueled by rising tuition, shrinking public support, and a political culture that demands ROI receipts from students and campuses. “At every level of American life” broadens the target beyond elite universities to K-12 testing regimes and vocational tracking: once education is justified primarily as economic sorting, it becomes easier to accept thinner curricula for some communities and richer ones for others.

Vest’s subtext is civic. A democracy that can’t defend learning on nonmarket grounds ends up with citizens trained to work, but less prepared to judge, imagine, and disagree well.