Is a college educations worth the hassle and expense? Amid concerns over soaring tuition costs and campus political intolerance, a growing share of Americans aren’t convinced that higher education is worthwhile. Academics themselves—the honest ones, anyway—acknowledge that they’ve squandered a lot of goodwill over the years. Fortunately, it’s still possible to get an education that justifies the time and money—though the path doesn’t necessarily go through college.

High Costs and Political Bias Sour Americans on College

“Three in 10 Americans (31%) think a college education is ‘very important,’ four percentage points below last year’s reading, the previous low among the seven times Gallup has asked this question since 1978,” the polling firm reported earlier this month. “As recently as 2013, more than twice as many U.S. adults (70%) said college was very important.” Gallup adds that “the percentage of U.S. adults who say a college education is ‘not too important’ has risen from 6% in 2013 to 29% today, while the percentage saying it is ‘fairly important’ has increased from 23% to 39%.”

Higher education plummeted in public esteem for more than one reason. For years, Americans have voiced concern about rising costs and political intolerance on campuses. Last year, even as a Vanderbilt University poll found a slight rebound in favorability toward colleges and universities, the authors noted that “Americans across the political spectrum still are deeply concerned about the affordability of higher education” and “many Americans see political bias in higher education as a serious problem.”

The problem was underlined this year when some colleges broke the $100,000 mark in annual costs. “Today, a bachelor’s degree at some of America’s top schools can cost upward of nearly half a million dollars over four years,” reported Business Insider. “And the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down.”

Almost at the same time, Vanderbilt released a report warning “there are several worrying tendencies in contemporary academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, all of which reflect, to varying degrees, a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.” The goals of this politicization, the study added, “are generally though not exclusively associated with the progressive left.”

Unsurprisingly, many Americans balk at paying through the nose so they (or their kids) can spend four years at woke camp. That trepidation undoubtedly contributes to declining college applications at a time when the applicant pool is already shrinking. Many students who do apply to college are applying very modern filters to the schools they’ll consider.

“The median student is willing to pay up to $2,617 (12.5%) more to attend a college where the share of students with opposing political views is 10 percentage points lower, suggesting that political identity plays a meaningful role in the college choice process,” found a 2025 study from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University which documented “a steady increase in political sorting across American colleges.”

This month, a survey from Art & Science Group, a higher education consultancy, found that among college applicants, “the share ruling out colleges solely because of politics in a state rose from 24% in 2023 to 31% in winter 2026 and 34% in summer 2026.”

Employers haven’t stopped hiring from prestigious colleges and universities. But the definition of “elite” has changed, with some firms leery of traditional Ivy Leagues and preferring southern schools where costs are lower and ideological tolerance still has a place.

College Still Offers Value for Those Who Choose Wisely

Higher education can still be worthwhile for students who apply due diligence to their selection of schools and fields of study. College offers a good return on the investment of time and money for those who choose wisely.

According to the Education Data Initiative, “an average bachelor’s degree has a 560.53% lifetime return on investment with a median lifetime return up to 1,040.14%.” But not all degrees are equal. “The most cost-efficient bachelor’s degree is in management information systems and statistics, with a lifetime ROI of 1,758.59%,” while “a Bachelor of Psychology offers the lowest lifetime ROI at -122.78%, representing a $54,188 loss in degree-based earnings (compared to median earnings with a high school diploma).”

The 10 bachelor’s degrees with the highest lifetime earnings are an assortment of engineering disciplines, management information systems and statistics, accounting, finance, economics, mathematics, and the like. But return on investment also depends heavily on the cost of the degree; it’s more difficult to get your money’s worth when you pay top dollar.

Importantly, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields are also the academic disciplines with the least lopsided political balance among professors.

Trade Schools Rise as Employer Demand for College Degrees Falls

But college is not the only choice for young Americans planning their futures. According to a 2025 Harris survey for the American Staffing Association, more Americans now recommend that graduating high school seniors go to trade school (33 percent) than recommend college (28 percent).

Trade schools cost a fraction of what four-year colleges cost. And they satisfy a growing demand for skilled workers.

“Of the 124 skilled trades occupations, 86 are projected to grow or hold steady, and more than 600,000 net new positions are projected through 2035,” the Alliance for Skilled Trades, a coalition of companies that depend on trades people, notes in a recent report. “Employers will need to fill about 1.7 million openings each year.”

Note that new positions are opening even as the population of job-market entrants shrinks.

And employers increasingly value experience and in-house training over college degrees of dubious value. Last year, a quarter of employers reported that they were eliminating requirements for bachelor’s degrees among new hires.

Higher education still has a role to play. But “education” doesn’t have to mean four years of high tuition. It can be a certification program or trade school that launches graduates into a productive life.

After decades of being the default path for many Americans, colleges and universities have alienated people with high prices and intolerant ideological environments. They still have a lot to offer, but now they have to compete with alternatives for the time and money of a skeptical public.

The post College Still Has a Future, but It's No Longer the Default Choice appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Prominent journalist, academic, and anti-racism activist Nikole Hannah-Jones recently wrote a controversial New York Times article, in which she expresses regret for her and her husband’s decision to place her daughter in underperforming majority-Black public schools in New York City. Hannah-Jones hoped that putting her daughter there would help improve education for disadvantaged minority children, as her family’s wealth and skills as political activists might stimulate reforms. Instead, her daughter ended up bitterly bemoaning the poor quality of the education she got, and Hannah-Jones’ well-meaning efforts to improve the public schools she attended accomplished very little. Eventually, at her daughter’s request, Hannah-Jones acknowledged error, and sent her daughter to a higher-quality selective high school.

Hannah-Jones’ story is a testament to the value of exit rights and choice. Although she does not seem to recognize it, the best way to help students from less advantaged families than her own is to expand exit and choice opportunities for them. That is what social science shows. Her story also resonated with me because of my own experience as both a struggling student and (later) a parent. That experience also highlights the value of exit rights and choice, even if in a slightly different way.

While I think Hannah-Jones hasn’t fully drawn the right lessons from her experience, I commend her for her willingness to acknowledge error. Few public intellectuals do that, and especially not on issues close to the heart of their ideological and personal commitments, as this one is for her.

Exit vs. Voice

Hannah-Jones initial decision to send her daughter to a poorly performing public schools was motivated by an argument associated with the great economist Albert Hirschman (though I don’t know if that’s where she got the idea). In his classic work, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Hirschman argued that exit rights can be harmful if it leads people to leave a flawed institution that they could instead stay and successfully reform using “voice.” He specifically applied this to the issue of school choice, arguing that the most savvy and politically influential parents might take their kids out of badly-performing schools, instead of staying and successfully reforming them.

In my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, I outlined some key limitations of Hirschman’s argument. I summarize my key points here:

It is important to recognize that Hirschman’s argument applies only in a narrow range of circumstances. In order for it to hold true, a subset of participants in a political institution must 1) be able to force through effective reforms where the others could not impose the reforms in their absence; 2) prefer to exit rather than exercise voice despite the likelihood that their use of voice will be successful; and 3) possess exit options that are not available to the others. If 1 holds true, it is hard to see why 2 would, since these individuals could instead get what they want without moving. The more foot voting opportunities become available to everyone, the more the third precondition is weakened.

Even if all three preconditions are met, foot voting by even some participants could give policymakers an incentive to enact needed reforms of their own accord in order to retain tax revenue from those who might exit. This seems to have occurred when it comes to the paradigm case that gave rise to Hirschman’s theory: school vouchers that give parents funds to transfer their kids to better-performing schools…. Peer-reviewed studies of the effects of vouchers find that they actually improve the quality of public schools “left behind” by those who exit. By contrast, simply increasing funds for traditional public schools without expanding exit rights has little or no educational benefit.

Point 1 above is of special relevance to Hannah-Jones’ experience. It turns out that she and others like here were not actually in a position to effectively promote beneficial reforms in the failing schools in which she enrolled her daughter. More fundamentally, the main problems besetting those schools are not lack of resources or lack of activism, but poor incentives. As economist Alex Tabarrok points out, New York City public schools spend over $40,000 per student per year (one of the highest averages in the nations), and P.S. 307 (the school where she initially sent her daughter) spends over $52,000. And MYC doesn’t lack for motivated political activists. The problem is that school officials and employees have little incentive to use those resources in ways that actually facilitate quality education. To put it crudely, they get paid the same, regardless of how well the kids do. If the latter perform poorly, that might even be a justification for increasing spending further. This is a large part of the cause of what Hannah-Jones calls “the callous disregard” for children’s needs of the faculty and staff at her daughter’s elementary school. Parental “voice” is unlikely to fix that.

By contrast, when parents can choose their schools (as Hannah-Jones eventually did), they can seek out ones that fit their kids’ needs better. And schools that rely on choice for their funding have strong incentives to actually educate the kids effectively. And, as noted in my book, studies indicate that expanding exit rights and choice particularly benefits the poor and disadvantaged – including minorities.

Hannah-Jones rightly laments that such options are often only available to the relatively affluent (most of whom are white). But there is much we can do to expand exit options for others.

As I explain in a series of articles coauthored with Josh Braver (see here and here), one way to do so is to break down exclusionary zoning, which – among other things – keeps poor and minority parents from moving their children to areas with better schools. Exclusionary zoning also has a horrible racist history.

We can also expand choice and exit rights by instituting universal school choice, which can – at least to a large extent – break the connection between residency and schooling, thereby particularly benefiting poor and disadvantaged students. In another recent article, I explain how this (along with other measures to expand “foot voting” opportunities) can help us more fully realize the promise of Brown v. Board of Education.

By contrast, New York City has only a very limited school choice system, which does not include private schools, and has various other constraints. Even the limited available system still creates important gains for poor Black and Hispanic students. But expanded choice and competition could make the system better.

One Student’s – And Parent’s – Experience

Some parts of Hannah-Jones’ story reminded me of aspects of my own, as both student and parent. I was far from an ideal student, and – later – far from an ideal parent. But those shortcomings accentuated the value of exit rights and choice, without which I (and later, my daughter) would have been far worse off.

My parents brought me to the United States from the Soviet Union when I was six. Obviously, pretty much everything I have managed to accomplish since them was the result of that choice – the difference between the opportunities offered by a relatively free society and those of a socialist dictatorship (which later became an only modestly less awful nationalist dictatorship).

More immediately relevant was my parents’ further use of exit rights in the US. I was no great student, and did not learn to read till the age of eight – a consequence of some combination of lack of motivation and what may have been undiagnosed dyslexia. When I was 11, my parents moved to the town of Lexington, Massachusetts, largely because it had better schools than the one where we lived previously, and their strengths were particularly well-suited to my needs. Like Hannah-Jones’ daughter, after she went to a stronger high school, I initially struggled in the new environment. But, eventually, I did much better. This move did not make as big a difference as that from Russia to the US. But it was significant, nonetheless. I recounted these experiences in  my 2010 immigration memoir, written for HIAS.

As a student at Lexington High School, I witnessed another benefit of school choice. The Boston area has a program called METCO, which allows inner-city students (mostly Black and Hispanic) to voluntarily apply to attend much stronger schools in the suburbs, such as LHS. Studies show that participants make major educational gains, and are more likely to attend college.

Many METCO students initially struggle in their new environments (as I did myself after we first moved to Lexington). And there is sometimes a gap between their grades and test scores, and those of the suburban kids in their new schools. When I was a high school junior, I wrote an article about this gap for the school newspaper, thereby unexpectedly causing something of a local controversy. Nonetheless, the program creates real progress for disadvantaged kids. And, unlike mandatory school busing – which led to outbreaks of violence and racism in the Boston area in the 1970s – METCO has met with little opposition.

Many years later, my own daughter Lydia, had educational issues of her own. When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, my wife and I saw that remote education in the Arlington, Virginia public schools would be a terrible fit for Lydia, given her need for occupational therapy, and what we later learned was a fairly serious case of dyslexia (likely worse than what I had). We made the decision to send her to a private school which – among other things – kept on with in-person education throughout the pandemic. Lydia did better, as a result (including after the pandemic). Had we instead worked to use “voice” to reform the local public schools, it’s unlikely we would have achieved much. Lydia would have suffered for nothing.

Nonetheless, progress was still uneven. Like me before her, Lydia still did not know how to read at the age of eight. After extensive consultation with specialists at her school and elsewhere, we finally hit upon the idea of teaching her to read by helping her memorize “sight word” flashcards. Like me, Lydia has trouble with visual learning, but is very good at learning through memorization and repetition.

For several months, Lydia and I spend 15-30 minutes every night memorizing sight words. We went from kindergarten sight words, all the way to fifth-grade ones. At the end of this not-always-fun process, Lydia could read at grade level, and the first book she read on her own was classic science fiction novel Ender’s Game, which is intended for adults. Today (at age 11), Lydia is an “academic superstar,” as her school’s principal put it.

In retrospect, I should have hit upon this fairly simple and cheap idea much earlier, especially given my own experiences. I am to blame for that oversight. The episode shows that even high-quality schools and teachers cannot fully substitute for parental judgment of their kids’ specific needs. But the school was invaluable in maintaining a measure of progress in the meantime. And discussions with their and other specialists helped us eventually figure out the right path.

In sum, no school is perfect, and parents need to be attentive to their kids’ individual situations. This reality creates difficulties for poor parents, single parents, and others less advantaged than Hannah-Jones or myself. But exit rights, choice, and competition can do much to improve the lot of poor and minority students.

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Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott believes that “civics and leadership education” are necessary to preserve Texas as “the greatest state in the greatest country.” However, the governor’s own policies are making it harder for some Texas students to receive the civic instruction that Abbott holds in such high regard. 

Last week, Southern Methodist University (SMU) informed the Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) that it could no longer host the group’s Muslim Youth Leadership Symposium in September. The conference would bring together high school and college-age Muslim students from across the state for a “day of leadership and civic engagement,” and include panels with community leaders, interactive workshops, and a visit to Dallas City Hall. 

In a statement to The Christian Post, Megan Jacob, SMU’s director of media relations, said, “the University has determined that permitting the event to take place on campus, given the State of Texas’ current designation of the symposium’s organizer, is inconsistent with our mission and related University policies.” The “current designation” referenced in the statement is Abbott’s November proclamation, deeming the CAIR a “foreign terrorist organization” (FTO). 

Abbott’s authority to designate the CAIR an FTO comes from Texas Senate Bill 1900, which the governor signed into law in 2023. Under this law, property owned by an FTO can be marked as a “public nuisance,” making it easier for the state to sue and seize the land. Law enforcement organizations are also required to “compile and maintain in a local or regional intelligence database” reports on the potentially criminal activities of FTOs, and forward this information to a centralized state-run database. Finally, certain violent and drug-related crimes committed as a member of an FTO carry harsher sentences.

Legislators initially couched the new law as a measure against Latin American cartel networks, but its wide-reaching definition of an FTO has allowed the law to be abused for political ends. S.B. 1900 defines foreign terrorist organizations as “three or more persons operating as an organization at least partially outside the United States who engage in criminal activity and threaten the security of this state or its residents.” 

Most of these provisions do not apply to the CAIR; the organization, whose mission is to “enhance understanding of Islam, protect civil rights, promote justice, and empower American Muslims,” has never been charged with any criminal activity, nor does it operate outside of the United States. However, prosecutors did identify the CAIR as a “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 2009 Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial. In his declaration, Abbott asserts that the CAIR is the “successor organization” to the Muslim Brotherhood, and that because individuals “associated with” the CAIR have either said violent things or been charged with financially supporting terrorist groups, the whole organization is criminal in nature. The CAIR has challenged the designation, and the case is still ongoing.

The confrontation between Texas and the CAIR is not unexpected. As a 2024 report from the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) observes, “the overbroad and vague provisions of state domestic terrorism laws create significant First Amendment and free expression concerns.”

Texas is just one of several states that have passed laws empowering the government to take broad and unilateral action against purported terrorist groups. Just a month after Abbott’s declaration in Texas, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis also unilaterally designated the CAIR as a “terrorist organization.” In Florida, this designation has meant that the CAIR and anyone who has “provided material support or resources” to the organization is forbidden from receiving any state funds, contracts, or benefits. 

Civil liberties groups have also warned that the Florida law could chill free speech. As Tyler Coward, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Reason‘s Meagan O’Rourke in April, the “bill goes too far in regulating unlawful conduct and will cast an impermissible chilling effect on campus discourse at Florida’s colleges and universities.”

The same ICNL report identified that 32 different states and Washington, D.C., now have their own domestic terrorism laws. In many of these states—including Georgia and Oklahoma—these laws read similarly to Texas’ and were initially passed to target cartels. Other states like Oregon have passed laws that append extra penalties to crimes if they are determined to be motivated by “domestic terrorism.” Almost all of these laws expand the definition of terrorism, and further equip the government with broad powers.

The CAIR intends to proceed with the Dallas leadership conference and is currently seeking an alternative location. Until a new site is determined, Texas residents can thank their state government for protecting them from the profound danger of students engaging with America’s civic process.

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The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) is facing an unlikely opponent: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. 

On August 19, Mamdani sued New York City Council over a UFT-backed law that would give teachers’ aides (also called paraprofessionals) a one-time $10,000 bonus. The bonus would be a substantial jump in pay for the city’s paraprofessionals, who earn as little as $33,000 a year. 

The New York City Council unanimously passed the legislation, called the RESPECT Check Act, in July, and it became law on August 19 without a signature or veto from Mamdani, reported Chalkbeat. That same day, New York City Hall filed a lawsuit attempting to block the law. Then, on August 25, the UFT filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuit. 

Mamdani’s lawsuit against the City Council largely details procedural concerns. In its complaint, the city argues that “the bill ignores nearly sixty years of well-established collective bargaining process under the Taylor Law—which requires that public employers and unions negotiate in good faith on mandatory subjects of bargaining.” 

The lawsuit also warns that “by circumventing that process and attempting to increase pay for school paraprofessionals by legislative fiat (at a cost, by its own conservative estimate, of $324.9 million), the Council has set a perilous and unlawful precedent with huge fiscal consequences for the DOE [Department of Education of the City School District of the City of New York] and the City—and, by extension, the tax-paying public.”

A spokesperson for the mayor, Matt Rauschenbach, echoed these collective bargaining concerns. He said the administration would “not allow the political process to replace the collective bargaining table.”

“The City is filing a lawsuit to protect the right of every union to negotiate on behalf of its members, to fight for the workplace they deserve and ensure that workers – not politicians – determine their own futures,” he added in his statement.  

The mayor, hardly the poster child for fiscal responsibility, is right to highlight the bill’s serious fiscal consequences. In July, the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), a nonpartisan civic watchdog group, released a statement opposing the bill, estimating “it would add $325 million in spending just two weeks after the budget was adopted.”

“If this bill becomes law, other unions may also seek legislation to increase compensation beyond what they collectively bargained,” the CBC added. “That would weaken the bargaining process, increase pressure for additional off-cycle compensation, and expose the City to substantial future costs.”

The bill’s lead sponsor, City Council member Carmen De La Rosa (who estimated the costs would be $250 million) argued that the costs would be justified, reported News 12 Brooklyn. In a joint statement with City Council Speaker Julie Menin, De La Rosa said the city has a paraprofessional job shortage, which has caused it to pay out $1.5 billion in settlements for failing to meet special education needs. 

As the New York Post editorial board suggested, Mamdani could raise paraprofessional pay “by finding the cash somewhere in the city’s bloated $39 billion schools budget and negotiating it in the next contract.” This would be ideal. But given his budget increases for the education department (even as New York City public school enrollment declines), he may cover the costs in the future by asking more of taxpayers without eliminating waste.

The post Mamdani Wants To Block a Law Giving Teachers' Aides $10,000 Bonuses. The Teachers Union Is Not Happy. appeared first on Reason.com.

Last week’s death of Jason Arday—the youngest black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history—who was accused of widespread plagiarism, has created a firestorm of reactions.

Some say Arday was targeted by racially motivated reactionaries who unfairly used him to dunk on diversity, equality, and inclusion. Cambridge Chancellor Chris Smith called the media investigations into Arday a “racist feeding frenzy,” and Simon Woolley, principal of Homerton College at Cambridge, said Arday had been subjected to a “vicious witch hunt,” reports the BBC. Others have gone a step further, calling for a crackdown on press freedoms.

“Freedom of the press should never have been freedom to own and dominate the press. (And push constant misinformation and lies.),” Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, wrote on X. “Media regulation. Now.”

After prominent journalist Andrew Neil challenged Polanski’s proposal and called it “fascism,” Polanski decided to double down by saying, “A few billionaires owning the majority of the press and behaving however they want is not a free press. Change is coming.”

The proposed press censorship is dystopian in itself, but Polanski’s claim that the “billionaires” own “the majority” of the press is less true today than it ever has been. According to Ofcom, the British media regulator, more than half of U.K. adults use social media to get their news. In 2025, Press Gazette reported that 11 major national newspapers were suffering double-digit, year-on-year circulation declines, with several losing around a fifth or more of their print readership. In other words, the media landscape is now far more decentralized than ever, and the barrier to entry is far lower (thanks in large part to the billionaires who have created the technology and platforms to do so).

This has not stopped progressive zealots from virtue signaling and joining the demand for press censorship. Writer Will Self wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham, calling on the government to “establish a full independent public inquiry” and for the police to begin “impounding computers.” He assures readers that “this is not an attack upon a free press,” but that “you don’t have to be innocent to possess a right not to be collectively destroyed.”

Polanski and several Labour members of Parliament have signed an open letter demanding press regulation. The letter accuses the press of racism and calls for a government investigation by the Independent Press Standards Organisation into the accusations against Arday. Clive Lewis, a Labour politician, said that the articles about Arday “reached way beyond what could be reasonably considered in the public interest,” and that “Accountability cannot mean turning a human being into public sport.” He is one of 53 parliamentarians who have signed the letter.

These calls for censorship are not merely hypothetical. Last year, Jack Grove, a reporter for Times Higher Education (THE), investigated Arday’s extraordinary claims—including academic plagiarism, raising 5 million pounds for charity and running 30 marathons in 35 days. Arday hired a defamation firm and reported Grove to the police, who then told Grove that he must not contact Arday again as “it was affecting his mental health.”

THE decided not to run the story. “While I was personally disappointed,” Grove later wrote, “I understood; by this point, Arday’s solicitors had been in touch with THE and it was clear that the story could tie the publication up in months of expensive litigation.”

The plagiarism rumors eventually reached Nathan Cofnas, a former researcher at Cambridge and now a Substack blogger, who investigated the claims himself and subsequently broke the story.

Perhaps, had the police not spent months investigating Grove, and had Grove been allowed to publish his findings, the story would have taken a different turn. The claims could have been “raised by a reputable sector publication, staffed by trained and conscientious journalists, which has no desire to inflict damage on the sector,” writes Grove. “Instead, the legal threat meant they were picked up by a Substack blogger who knew the potency of what he had found and was ready to draw conclusions that I do not agree with.”

Of course, Arday’s death is a tragedy, but the press have every right to ask questions. Arday was a high-profile academic who has advised the British government on the national school curriculum. He testified before parliamentary committees, worked at a taxpayer-funded institution, and was reportedly working on projects that received millions of pounds of taxpayer cash.

As Reason’s Robby Soave noted earlier this week, “if we start policing people for asking totally legitimate questions of public figures, like a notable academic, then we are quickly going to render important institutions—like academia—immune to criticism. That would be a terrible mistake, quite obviously.”

Press freedom is essential to a free society. Without it, people are prevented from obtaining necessary information in the public interest, and bad actors cannot be held accountable. The irony is that, while some politicians now argue that tighter press restrictions are needed to prevent another case like Arday’s, it was arguably censorship that inflicted greater harm.

The post Censors Seize on Jason Arday's Death as Excuse To Demand More Censorship appeared first on Reason.com.

There’s a quiet revolution happening in K-12 education, driven by parents and teachers who say they’ve had enough.

Jessica Zivkovic knows the feeling. “Ultimately I got to a point where I knew that we needed a whole overhaul,” she says, “and I could not bring about the change within the system.”

A handful of states are pushing school choice to the max. “There are a lot of eyes on Florida right now,” says Tiffany Thenor. “We are kind of the pioneers of this universal voucher.”

In the Sunshine State, about 14 percent of students attend a charter school and roughly 15 percent use state vouchers or education savings accounts, and traditional public schools are gradually losing students. It’s like a slowly deflating balloon. And the teachers union says it’s reckless.

“What we’re seeing in Florida—it feels like an abandonment of public schools,” says Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association.

But it’s not slowing down.

Is this the future of American education?

The students at WonderHere in Lakeland, Florida, start their days with farm chores, gardening, and outdoor play. “I like my school. It’s fun. I like that we have animals and we get to play outside,” says Eva, one of the students. William, another student, adds that farm life “teaches you how to be more responsible”—that if you touch something you’re not supposed to, “it could end up costing the lives of some of the animals.”

WonderHere was started 10 years ago by public school teachers Tiffany Thenor and Jessica Zivkovic. Zivkovic describes the moment she knew the system was broken: “I was teaching second grade at a different school, and our administration said that they did not want any use of crayons, scissors, coloring pages, any sort of crafting in the classroom—like everything should be paper and pencil. And this is 7-year-olds.”

She compares it to a scene in the film Matilda: “It felt like Ms. Trunchbull is coming down the hall and you have to hide all of your colorful things and all of the fun crafts and all the color. Because that’s not allowed. Those are the moments that just really taught me that the system was so broken.”

They started WonderHere as a private school. Today, it operates out of two converted homes on a 10-acre property. The curriculum incorporates teaching practices from Montessori, the child-centered educational philosophy known as Reggio Emilia, and academic standards from Finland. There are just 120 students on the Lakeland campus.

“We have a 12-to-1 student-teacher ratio,” says Thenor, “and that allows for our teachers to be able to personalize each student’s learning, to meet with them one-on-one each day, to make sure that they are taking notes and being observant of their learning behaviors and their interests.”

WonderHere began accepting state vouchers in 2023 after Florida made them available to all students seeking an alternative to their zoned schools. Thenor says 95 percent of their Florida students now use a voucher.

“It’s been a huge blessing for us to be able to accept students with the Florida Empowerment Voucher,” says Zivkovic. “When we started WonderHere, we never wanted it to be a place that was only for families who could afford it.”

Florida’s vouchers, worth about $8,000, almost completely cover WonderHere’s $9,000 annual five-day tuition.

Colossal Academy in Fort Lauderdale is also part of the “microschool” movement, replicating the feel of the one-room schoolhouse, with kids of different ages together in one setting. State vouchers enable more families to send their kids here.

“It’s been a godsend, literally,” says parent Sadiqa Glusman. “We wouldn’t be able to afford going here.”

The vouchers cover about half the cost of Colossal’s full-time tuition. The average secular private day school tuition nationwide is $49,000 a year. By contrast, three-quarters of microschools nationwide charge less than $10,000, according to a National Microschooling Center survey.

“Today’s emerging schooling models are nothing like typical private schools,” says Kerry McDonald, the author of Joyful Learning: How to Find Freedom, Happiness, and Success Beyond Conventional Schooling.

“School choice mechanisms certainly make alternative education options more financially accessible to more families, and that leads more families to look around and see what’s available to them, which then leads more potential founders to go ahead and respond to that demand for something new and different by opening a new school or space,” McDonald says.

Families can also spend money from their education savings accounts at homeschool “co-ops,” which became popular when public schools shut down during COVID. McDonald notes that “many of these new schools and hybrid learning communities and homeschool collaboratives…were sprouting all across the country, primarily created in many cases by former public school teachers who left the classroom either during COVID or shortly thereafter, and began creating their own learning communities focused around individualized, flexible, student-centered education.”

The national homeschooling rate has been increasing at about 5 percent a year, more than double the pre-pandemic rate. Microschooling is also growing, serving an estimated 750,000 U.S. students, though the line between microschooling and homeschooling can be blurry. Microschools serve a disproportionate share of “students with learning differences whose needs aren’t being met in traditional schooling environments,” according to a 2025 report by the RAND Corporation.

The founder of Colossal Academy is Shiren Rattigan, a former Chicago public school teacher. It started as a homeschool pod during the pandemic.

“It’s March 2020 and people just didn’t know what to do,” she recalls. “We started with four students, and I thought, ‘OK, well, if you pay me less than what you’re paying the Montessori school, it’ll still make my salary, and I only have to be responsible for four children.’ And so I did, and the students were like, ‘Can we go to the beach?’ And I’m like, ‘yeah, hop in the car. ‘ They’re like, ‘can we start gardening?’ I’m like, ‘whatever you need.’ That just completely opened my eyes into the possibilities of what we should be calling school—everything in the world could actually be their classroom.”

The actual academic instruction is a blend of in-person and self-directed virtual learning.

Rattigan says the model is especially well-suited to kids who don’t thrive in traditional settings, “whether it be like super hyperactive boys that don’t want to sit still—and they shouldn’t have to, right? The learning environment needs to allow and forgive and give grace for our students that need to move.”

Seventy percent of Florida students attended district-run public schools last year. That’s down from 86 percent 25 years ago. That means the traditional public schools have a lot less money.

Spar says public schools have absorbed the financial hit. “There was about $260 or $280 million that got withheld from public schools. And those withholdings were because the voucher program needed more money.”

Florida state Sen. Don Gaetz (R–Pensacola) supports school choice but also became a leading critic of how Florida has administered its voucher and education savings account program after a state auditor report cited a “myriad of accountability challenges.” At a Senate committee hearing, Gaetz noted: “They cannot locate 30,000 students that they’re paying for. That’s $270 million that we’re paying for students, which on any given day of the week, we can’t find.”

Gaetz introduced a bill that would separate the funding of vouchers and education savings accounts from district school funding to better track the money. “I introduced the bill because as a strong supporter of school choice, I wanted to make sure that school choice wasn’t besmirched by the way that the Family Empowerment Scholarship legislation had rolled out,” says Gaetz, a former school superintendent.

In some cases, public schools are getting state money to educate students who are also receiving vouchers. Gaetz says “$1 to 2 million” may also have gone to fund education savings accounts for students who don’t exist. One private school is accused of taking voucher money for students who never attended. According to the state auditor, the state failed to recoup between roughly $10 million and $59 million in overpayments.

“By mixing all the money we began a chain of accounting problems and financial management problems,” says Gaetz.

Some school choice advocates oppose Gaetz’s bill on the grounds that separating out voucher funding will make it easier to cut. Gaetz isn’t worried: “We have a Republican governor who favors school choice, a Republican House that favors school choice, and a Republican Senate that favors school choice. Who are we afraid of?”

Spar says public schools aren’t competing on a level playing field. “We have right now in the State of Florida 1,408 pages of public school law that every public school must follow. But when you look at charter schools, it’s less than 100 pages. When you look at vouchers in Florida, it’s less than 20 pages of laws that those schools have to follow. So it doesn’t sound like we have a very fair system in the state.”

Gaetz introduced a bill to cut down on public school regulation, but Spar also wants more regulation of private schools.

“Why shouldn’t they be required to tell parents the types of teachers they have there?” Spar asks. “Do they have college degrees? Because in a lot of cases they do not. Are they certified as a teacher in the state of Florida”

That kind of restrictive licensing and regulation is exactly what the founders of WonderHere and Colossal say they were escaping.

Rattigan says she’s held accountable by her customers. “If I’m not doing what my families want, they go, right? And so then I’m either forced to change, whereas we have failing [public school] systems that continue to be funded. When a school is failing, they don’t shut it down in a traditional public environment. They keep it open and, in fact, they throw more money at it.”

When we visited Colossal, part of the students’ day was spent harvesting in the garden and cooking stir-fry. They also study art, music, photography, and how to fly a drone. More regulation and licensing would make such programs more difficult and expensive to operate.

“Adults who are experts really want access to young people, and we just can’t do that in the traditional [setting],” says Rattigan. “There are too many barriers to entry to be able to work with young people. We are so happy to take all that expertise.” She adds that subject experts “may not know how to work with young people,” so “we’re teaching them how to teach.”

Rattigan says she can try new things and abandon them quickly if they aren’t working. “If a student wanted drones, they would tell me on Tuesday. By Thursday, I have drones. By the next Tuesday, we have a teacher in, we’re doing drones. It’s actionable and fast.” That flexibility disappears in a more regulated environment. “If I was in a traditional public [school], I would have to go and ask my principal, and then they’d have to check the district, and then everybody in eighth grade, the following year or two, would be doing drones. Not the four kids that asked me for it.”

When asked about accountability, Rattigan pushes back: “It’s a new market. You can’t use old standards to measure a new market. That’s with anything, right? When you build anything new, you have to create new matrices by which you decide something is successful or not. In our particular school, we believe in rigor. And our students are taking a standardized test. But we’re in a moment now of innovation—can we use the same old archaic measurement tools to study something that’s brand new?”

Voucher and education savings account recipients do have to take some standardized tests for tracking purposes, but the results don’t affect a private school’s “rating” or funding in the way they would a traditional public school.

“We do not consider those tests to be high stakes,” says Thenor. “We just consider them to be one additional piece of data.”

The founders at WonderHere say the government’s intense focus on standardized test scores has created the one-dimensional, stifling environment they want to disrupt.

“The Department of Education really wants there to be accountability and cohesion because that’s easy to create data from, it’s easy to monitor progress, it is easy to determine whether a school is passing or failing,” says Zivkovic. “But there is a cost to that accountability. We’re not opposed to monitoring students’ progress, but it cannot come at the cost of such a rigid structure. Our children—we’re humans, right? We’re not like a product in a factory that can be easily discarded if it doesn’t meet quality standards.”

Florida has made the wager that if public and private schools alike must compete for students, standardized tests alone will no longer determine whether a school is failing or not: Families will.

Gaetz puts it bluntly: “It used to be that you move into a community, you know where your local school is, your zone for that school, that’s where your child goes. Now, none of that is true anymore. Now it’s an unstable and unpredictable marketplace. And school districts are going to have to choose: Do they want to be a collection of buildings that begin to be emptied out and an employment agency for unions? Or do they want to supply services and goods to parents and teachers and students?”

And that seems to be exactly what’s happening. Many district-run public schools have adapted to the competition by rebranding as “magnet” schools and touting their arts, science, or other specialized programs. Even Spar’s daughter bypasses her zoned high school to attend one with an extensive dance program. When asked whether he supports that kind of choice, Spar says “that absolutely is something I support wholeheartedly.” He adds: “We’re not advocating for ending vouchers or charter schools. We’re not in that position at all. The question is, are we going to give public schools the ability to experiment too?”

Gaetz, for his part, wants to do exactly that. “I think it’s a fair assessment that public schools are regulated more. That’s why I support as much deregulation in public schools as we possibly can do. In fact, we have a major dereg bill moving through the legislature this year.”

And at least one Florida public school has plans to incorporate lessons from the private sector. WonderHere will run two K-1 classrooms at a struggling public school next school year. “The parents will opt in. They will lean into the learning environment the way our private school parents do. We will not do letter grades. We will not do report cards. We will do far less paper [and] pencil. They will play outside. We might even get chickens if I can pull it off,” says Thenor.

“When we started WonderHere, our goal was always to try and influence public education,” adds Zivkovic. “We never wanted to leave and turn our backs and just say, ‘Well, good luck, guys.’ We wanted to do something that proved that a different type of learning could exist.”

So what about waste and fraud? Gaetz’s bill failed in the Florida House, but the State Department of Education has begun checking directly with school districts instead of relying on parent surveys to avoid paying for double enrollment. The nonprofit that distributes the funds has enhanced its monitoring efforts and reports that accounts flagged for possible double-billing fell from 28,000 to 6,000.

School choice in Florida remains broadly popular. Education savings accounts are the most popular form of school choice, according to recent polls. The future of education looks more decentralized, nimble, and, for some, micro.

“I think microschooling is here to stay,” says Rattigan. Thenor agrees: “All of these beautiful vouchers that are coming out, giving parents the opportunity to take their funding and choose what’s best for them and their family—I think that is powerful and it’s a power parents should always have.” McDonald puts it in broader terms: “More and more families are demanding more options for their children’s education, more education models that are reflective of the realities of the 21st century. I have so much personalization in the other goods and services that I access. I want that same level of personalization in my children’s education.”

The post The Rise of Florida's 'Microschools' appeared first on Reason.com.

As the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence nears, it looks like Americans overwhelmingly approve of their country’s cardinal principles.

That’s the top-line finding from a recent survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) about the legacy of America’s founding. While its results did reflect a generational divide—baby boomers were much friendlier to the Founding than Gen Z—73 percent of the younger generation still agreed that “the founders deserve respect…for how they set up the United States.” And 74 percent of Gen Z respondents agreed that “studying the political principles of the founding fathers can help inform our decisions today.”

Support for Founding principles was also impressively robust across party lines: 92 percent of Republicans and 77 percent of Democrats said that it was “more important than ever to teach all kids the history of the founding fathers.”

But though the sentiment is generally popular, its specific implementations tend to be rather controversial. In Florida, a recently devised A.P. U.S. History alternative, which casts the Founding and its Enlightenment-influenced classical liberalism in a rosier light, has been characterized by the media as an “anti-woke” reaction and a specifically “conservative” reform. 

The AEI survey also revealed surprisingly broad support for capitalism. Among 5,306 respondents, 82 percent said it was “very” or “somewhat important” to teach about “the benefit of free market capitalism” in high schools. Only 4 percent said that it should not be taught.

The result stands in stark contrast with other recent polling on the popularity of capitalism. For instance, a Gallup survey from last September found that just 54 percent of Americans have a positive opinion of the economic system, down from 61 percent in 2010.

There have been other prominent indications that Americans’ faith in the free market could be slipping. New York City, for instance, elected a self-avowed socialist for mayor, who used his inauguration speech to decry “the frigidity of rugged individualism.” (Washington, D.C., may soon follow in NYC’s footsteps.)

Still, not all of the AEI survey results tell a story of Americans eager to “accentuat[e] positive views of America.” Among parents surveyed in 1998, 50 percent said they would be upset if their children’s teacher “constantly criticized America’s economic and political system”—this year, only 32 percent agreed.

But beneath the malaise, it would seem that Americans are fundamentally committed to the values and freedoms of the Founding. “Much has changed since the late 1990s,” the AEI report reads, but “still, most Americans in 2026 report that they are familiar with our founding documents and endorse long-standing civic ideals such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and equal opportunity.”

The post Americans Still Believe in the Founding—and Want Schools To Teach Capitalism appeared first on Reason.com.

In the 2024–2025 school year, 60.2 percent of grades awarded at Harvard were A’s, according to the school’s Office of Undergraduate Education. For context, only a quarter of undergraduates received A’s two decades ago, reported The Harvard Crimson. 

Harvard students are undoubtedly bright, but should professors be giving them that many A’s? According to Harvard’s new grade inflation policy, no. On Wednesday, the school’s faculty voted 458–201 to put a 20 percent cap on A grades starting in the 2027–2028 school year, reports the Crimson. The plan, the outlet reports, would also allow for professors to give four additional A’s per course enrollment. 

A 2025 report attributed Harvard’s “out of whack” (as one faculty member described it) grading system to a few factors, including professors’ unwillingness to be perceived as “demanding” compared to other faculty and “increasingly litigious” students. 

The college also acknowledged that the pressure to inflate grades may come from the school itself, admitting that professors were increasingly expected to provide emotional support to students struggling with “difficult family situations,” “imposter syndrome,” and “stress.” As a result, “requirements were relaxed, and grades were raised, particularly in the year of remote instruction.” Many faculty members wanted to “reverse that shift,” but they reportedly feared whether the administration would “have their back.” Finally, the school shifted from assigning high-stakes exams to giving more, lower-stakes assignments, which many professors found difficult to assess in a “sufficiently differentiated way.”   

Harvard is not the only school struggling with grade inflation. In Yale’s recent report examining why Americans have lost trust in higher education, the school acknowledged that grade inflation was partially to blame. To “restore common grading norms,” the report recommended instituting “a 3.0 mean, or some other college-wide standard, so that letter grades can once again be used in a reliable and comparable way.” The report also recommended that Yale transcripts provide context for where students stand “relative to the rest of the class,” so students are not penalized for taking more demanding courses. Reason’s intern Ari Shtein, a current Yale student, has suggested this may be a more sensible, context-based approach to tackling grade inflation than instituting a grading cap.

Princeton recognized the grade inflation problem early, and in 2004, it adopted a grade cap policy. But it “abandoned the system a decade later after criticism that it disadvantaged students in competition for jobs and graduate school admission,” reported the Associated Press. Since then, the problem has resurfaced, with A-minuses, A’s, and A-pluses making up 66.7 percent of undergraduate grades in the 2024–2025 school year. 

Tackling grade inflation always seems to produce some controversy, understandably among students. When Harvard released its October report on grade inflation, several students told the Crimson the report “misrepresented their academic experience and would add pressure to an already demanding campus environment.”

In a statement released Wednesday, Harvard’s dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh said that grade inflation is a “complex and thorny issue.” Still, she encourages other institutions to confront similar issues with “the same level of rigor and courage.”

Harvard is taking a risk by curbing grade inflation, but it is one that others would need to adopt to restore meritocracy across the board. If other schools continue to dole out A’s like Oprah while others assess students more harshly, employers will continue to receive unclear and potentially misleading signals about students’ academic performance. And grades are not just for employers’ eyes; they are for the students to understand how well they have mastered a subject. If the purpose of a university is to pursue truth, students deserve honest feedback from their professors, even if that means receiving lower grades.

The post 60% of Harvard Grades Were A's in 2025. Now the School Is Fighting Grade Inflation. appeared first on Reason.com.

Farmer Alfalfa heads to town with an old truck full of corn. The truck is on the verge of collapse. But after selling his corn to Grocer Cat, Farmer Alfalfa uses the money to buy a new truck.

On another day, Alfalfa sells all kinds of produce and uses the money to make purchases from local merchants, including Stitches the tailor and Blacksmith Fox. Stitches, in turn, uses the money from Alfalfa to buy “an egg beater so that his family can make fudge,” while Fox buys more iron to use in his blacksmith business.

Welcome to the very busy—and pro-market—world of children’s book author and illustrator Richard Scarry. If you were a child in the latter half of the last century, there’s a good chance you read some of Scarry’s books. The man was prolific, completing more than 150 works from the 1950s to the 1980s (with many more Scarry books published after his death in 1994).

The Alfalfa stories come from Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?, originally published in 1968. Set in Busytown, the book introduces readers to an array of professions—from carpenters and electricians to mail carriers, sailors, stay-at-home mothers, air traffic controllers, and many more.

Along the way, What Do People Do All Day? demystifies industrial processes that may be especially unfamiliar to young readers in the 21st century: how wheat growing in a field becomes the bread you can buy in a bakery, how cotton becomes clothing, how trees become paper, how coal becomes electricity. Some of the steps described by Scarry may now be a little outdated—but that means today’s readers get a history lesson too.

My sons, ages 2 and 4, are fascinated by chapters such as “The story of seeds and how they grow” and “Building a new road.” They are delighted by zany Busytown characters such as Gorilla Bananas (the friendly neighborhood fruit thief) and Lowly Worm (who pops up unexpectedly throughout the vignettes).

To me, the book’s most notable feature is its uncomplicated and nonchalant promotion of free market economics. Again and again in What Do People Do All Day?, Scarry illustrates how capitalism can benefit both buyer and seller. Busytown characters use their labor and skills to provide products and services their neighbors want and, in exchange, earn money that they use to fulfill their own families’ needs or invest in their own business activities.

What makes this especially great is that the book’s pro-market bent feels more incidental than ideological. This isn’t a book that hits readers over the head with a particular worldview. Rather, it implies a defense of free market capitalism just by describing the simple and symbiotic way that free markets work.

It may sound funny to say that realism lies at the heart of books full of anthropomorphic animals, several of whom drive pickle-shaped vehicles. But whimsy and realism go hand in hand in Busytown, in a way that just so happens to showcase some basic economic truths.

If they were ever known, Scarry’s personal political views seem to have been lost to history. But What Do People Do All Day? isn’t the only Scarry book that feels slyly oriented toward individualism.

In The Bunny Book, originally published in 1955, family members of a baby bunny take turns speculating about what the little boy will be when he grows up. “But the baby bunny did not want to be a doctor or a lifeguard or a farmer with a fine red tractor when he grew up,” it says. Instead, “the baby bunny will be a daddy rabbit” who plays games with his kids, reads them books, and tucks them into bed each night.

The Bunny Book—which was illustrated by Scarry and written by his wife, Patricia—never explicitly comments on this gender-role subversion. Unlike so many “message” books aimed at kids today, Scarry’s work lets readers make of the story what they will. It’s not even apparent if the Scarrys intended a message here at all, beyond the fact that this particular cute baby bunny boy’s ambition was to be a dad.

Over the years, Scarry got some flak for nonliberated portrayals of female characters in some of his early books. In later editions, he would add male characters in domestic roles, give the female animals more diverse jobs, and make other updates to keep up with changing mores. But the basic benefits of markets seem to have stood the test of time in Busytown.

The post The Happy Capitalism of Richard Scarry's Busytown appeared first on Reason.com.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! If you’re pregnant and about to give birth, maybe avoid hockey games—or else your child might be known for getting born during a 5–1 drubbing.

We’re coming to you a day early this week with reaction to President Donald Trump’s executive order that he thinks will fix college sports (it will not). We’ll start with that, move on to some sports TV news, and close with thoughts on the Masters ticket lottery. Giddy up.

But first, congratulations to Reason‘s own Phillip “The Ultimate Fris” Bader on winning our women’s bracket challenge, followed by Carl “Milwaukee’s Best” Peterson in second. Yours truly came in third—smart enough to pick UCLA to win, not chalky enough to beat Phillip and Carl.

Locker Room Links

• After bailing out the government authority that owns Progressive Field and Rocket Arena, Cleveland’s Democratic Mayor Justin Bibb is looking at raising fees on fans and businesses to fund stadium repairs.
• If you try to teach your underage child how to bet responsibly in New York State, you might get banned from concerts and casino restaurants.
• FanDuel Sports Network (formerly Bally Sports Network and Fox Sports Network) is coming to an end soon after the NBA and NHL seasons.
• “New Jersey cannot regulate Kalshi’s prediction market, US appeals court rules.”
• England’s Premier League is “voluntarily” (after a consultation with the government) banning gambling sponsors on jerseys starting next season. Now teams (usually smaller ones) are trying to find tens of millions of lost dollars.
• Augusta National Golf Club is famously extremely protective of its image—it has at least 67 registered or pending trademarks on various phrases and images.
• Volleyball on the rise: Two women’s volleyball matches are happening at Wrigley Field over Labor Day weekend.
• Elsewhere in Reason, our new cover story on presidential power: “Trump Realized He Can Just Do Things. Who Can Stop Him?“
• Go Blue.
  

  Michigan’s best players are a guy Mick Cronin buried, a guy who was a bust at North Carolina, a guy who came off the bench at Illinois and a guy who played at freaking UAB.

  Get outta here. https://t.co/cSUiYxV5un

  — Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) April 5, 2026

Can the President Regulate College Sports?

This certainly isn’t the first time Trump has tried to bring order to a chaotic situation and just ended up making it messier.

The president signed an executive order late on Friday attempting to overhaul how college sports function. The order says college athletes can only play five seasons, and they must happen during a five-year window (even though state judges are already saying otherwise). It also allows only one transfer (even though a 2024 antitrust legal settlement already said the NCAA can’t restrict transfers). Any schools that accept an athlete breaking these rules risk losing their federal funding. It also asks the attorney general (whoever that may be) to invalidate state laws that are in conflict with the order. The order takes effect on August 1.

Yet by the time you read this, the executive order may have already been challenged and stopped in federal courts.

You might think the president would be more focused on the big issues of the day, like inflation or the war he chose to start against Iran, but anyone who’s been a dedicated reader of this newsletter knows the president talks about fixing college sports almost every week.

Many people are frustrated with the constantly changing rules governing college sports, especially transfers and eligibility. A more proactive version of the NCAA may have taken the lead on these issues before the courts forced their hand. Instead, the NCAA has basically said there’s not much they can do, and asked Congress to figure out their mess. Now we have rules created by lawsuits that are ever changing and different by state.

These rules are, for good reason, not something the president can change with the swipe of a pen. But the Trump executive order has made the chaos even worse. Schools are stuck between a rock and a hard place: follow the president’s set of rules, or follow the rules that were set by various court decisions? They have to break someone’s rules, and that’s going to lead them straight back to court.

Apparently the real goal of Trump’s executive order is “to spur legislative action,” sources told The Athletic. But even rules passed by Congress are going to end up getting challenged on constitutional grounds. Attorneys’ billable hours remain undefeated.

The American college sports system is weird and unique. No other country spends as much time, energy, or money on collegiate sports. But Trump’s executive order is a great argument for getting federal government funding out of higher education altogether. “American universities spent $60 billion in federal money in 2023, more than 30 times what they spent in 1953, accounting for inflation,” according to calculations in The New York Times.

Schools wouldn’t have to worry about the president taking all that federal funding away over sports regulations if they didn’t take any federal funding.

Stopping Streaming in its Tracks

Did you know businesses don’t like competition, and often try to use the government to protect themselves? Fox Corp. and Sinclair Broadcasting certainly know it, since they’re trying to get the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to knock down league broadcasting deals with streamers.

“Fox Corp. and Sinclair Broadcasting last Friday submitted statements to the FCC that effectively characterized the streamers as a clear and present danger to the local TV business, with Fox labeling the digital interlopers as an ‘existential threat,'” Anthony Crupi writes for Sportico. Sinclair (which “operates or otherwise provides services to 185 TV stations,” as Crupi describes it) seems to feel entitled to the NFL. Their FCC letter said: “Sports programming is also critical to the financial model that supports local broadcast journalism. Without high-value live sports on broadcast television, local broadcast journalism will suffer.”

The context here is that CBS is renegotiating its deal with the NFL, and FOX is expected to be up next. The old-school broadcasters are worried the NFL might replace them if they get a better offer from a more cash-rich streamer like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or Apple TV. So now Fox and Sinclair are crying foul to the FCC, hoping for regulation or any kind of government pressure to stave off the streamers. The FCC’s recent request for comment on sports streaming was, as I wrote, “clearly a shot across the bow of sports leagues—a warning that the FCC may consider regulating games on streaming services in some way, or requiring leagues to broadcast every game on TV or the old-school regional sports networks.”

Threats to old business models are how a competitive economy should work. That’s what happens when businesses innovate and deliver new benefits for consumers. Fox and Sinclair aren’t entitled to NFL media rights any more than the Cowboys are entitled to a Super Bowl: You’ve got to be competitive and earn it. But instead of competing, Fox and Sinclair are hoping that whining to the FCC will get them some help. Since they’re both known for favorable coverage of Trump, they might just get it—and totally upend the landscape for streaming sports in the meantime.

The Masters Ticket Lottery Is Dumb

With apologies to soccer, golf is the real beautiful game—and this is the most beautiful week in golf, as the best golfers in the world head to Augusta, Georgia, for the Masters.

But unless you have some truly incredible luck or truly incredible wealth, you probably won’t be there in person. Augusta National distributes Masters tickets via lottery. If you win their lottery, you can get tickets for $140 each. Your odds of winning the Masters lottery in any given year are under 1 percent. If you don’t get through in the lottery, you better have $17,000 to spend on a premium hospitality ticket. Heading over to a ticket resale website is not a great option. As I wrote last year, “You can try to pay through the nose for a pass on the secondary market, but Augusta National has a strict ban on resale tickets and might not let you in—so you risk spending $2,500 on a resale ticket, plus hundreds more on flights and lodging, just to get turned away.”

Basically, as “Rick Golfs” points out below: “Now if you don’t win the lottery, you are screwed. Almost no chance of ever attending. Before you could at least bucket list it and do it once.”

What would you pay to attend the Masters?

The Masters has officially surpassed The Super Bowl and World Cup as the most expensive sports ticket.

$2,000 for practice round
$16,000 for Thursday
$8,000 for Sunday.

Why? The Masters has started cracking down on resellers, so… pic.twitter.com/GXMC2Z7Fcr

— Rick Golfs (@Top100Rick) April 5, 2026

Augusta National has every right to ban ticket resale, but their low prices are not ensuring the most dedicated people are getting in. Raising the price of a day pass, or just adding some extra steps to weed out more casual fans, would help. 

Replay of the Week

The fact that these all happened in a one-run game is mind-boggling. Although I wasn’t actually all that impressed by the first two, which were mostly just well-timed jumps—the last one shows absolutely no regard for his own body.

All THREE of Jo Adell's home run robberies from tonight …

Yes, you read that right ???? https://t.co/bc0Wb9i1Ii pic.twitter.com/axhyQFpLHD

— MLB (@MLB) April 5, 2026

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the weekend, the Houston Gamblers against the D.C. Defenders and the beer snake in the UFL.

The post Trump's College Sports Executive Order Adds Chaos to an Already Wild Legal War appeared first on Reason.com.