Universities Offer Up Counterfeit Credentials

[Herbert Spencer]

Universities Offer Up Counterfeit Credentials

By Christian Schneider
May 14, 2026 6:30 AM

 
The Faye and Joe Wyatt Center for Education on the campus of Peabody College at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., September 18, 2018. (Harrison McClary/Reuters) 

As trust in higher education plummets, colleges are diluting the value of their degrees.

Perhaps you’ve heard the tale of the historical museum that boasted of a spectacular artifact in its collection. It was George Washington’s bona fide original axe — the head had been replaced only twice, the handle just three times. According to a recent piece by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, colleges and universities are increasingly adopting the “George Washington’s axe” model of expansion.

Seeking to increase their national footprint, these schools are establishing branch campuses across America. Nashville’s Vanderbilt University, for instance, is acquiring the facilities of the San Francisco–based California College of the Arts, a financially bankrupt small college, and turning the school into a four-year undergraduate satellite campus. Vanderbilt is also launching a campus in West Palm Beach and has created a program in Manhattan. Since 2011, Northeastern University in Boston has established eight branch campuses, with a focus on graduate education. Over 20 schools have established satellite campuses in Washington, D.C.

While administrators see expansion as a means to increase their schools’ influence, can a college student who attends classes at a collection of buildings hundreds of miles from the main campus, with faculty sometimes drawn from the lesser school that was taken over, still be said to attend that college?

These schools are swapping in spare parts and asking students to believe they are seeing the real thing. But a degree from a branch campus of an elite university is the Four Seasons Total Landscaping of academic credentials.

Colleges and universities are already having trouble attracting and retaining students. According to a November 2025 NBC News poll, nearly two-thirds of registered voters — 63 percent — now say a four-year degree isn’t worth the cost. Just a decade ago, the country was almost evenly split on the question. Gallup has tracked the collapse in institutional confidence: In 2015, 57 percent of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education. By 2023, that number had cratered to 36 percent.

Against this backdrop, the branch-campus arms race represents one of the more spectacular acts of market self-sabotage in recent memory. Universities are hemorrhaging public trust faster than major league umpires who get half their balls-and-strikes calls wrong, and the schools’ response is to expand. They sell exactly one thing — prestige — and they have decided the best time to dilute it is when the market is already skeptical of the product.

This is a peculiar form of institutional narcissism. The implicit argument of the branch campus is that the university’s brand name is so powerful that it can be stretched across zip codes like Silly Putty. Northeastern thinks eight branch campuses across the country are a sign of strength rather than a franchise operation that has confused quantity for quality. If this logic holds, by 2028 we should expect a Georgetown University location in a strip mall somewhere outside of Scottsdale, nestled between a vape shop and a massage parlor.

The real value of attending an elite university has never been purely academic, of course. It’s experiential and social — you learn how to get along with people you wouldn’t normally mix with, develop (ideally) into a self-sufficient grown-up, and make lifelong friends. (My roommates once set all the clocks in the room ahead three hours. I woke up for a 9 a.m. class at 6 a.m., not realizing it until I walked into an empty classroom. I hated that I’d been had, but I love those guys even more now. It was a solid bit.)

The college experience is very much the particular texture of a place, the people you argue with in a dorm lounge at midnight, the accumulated atmosphere of an institution that has been doing what it does for generations. The cool thing about being on a campus is walking the same halls that respected figures in American life once walked. You can’t get that in Suite A of an office tower with a college’s name hung on the door.

Then there’s the international side of things. When universities establish branch campuses in foreign countries, the self-betrayal becomes something worse than commercial cynicism — it becomes a genuine threat. Major elite American universities, including Duke, Johns Hopkins, New York University, and the University of Michigan, have established satellite campuses in China to tap wealthy Chinese families for tuition revenue.

These are, in many cases, the same institutions whose faculty deliver solemn lectures on the domestic dangers of authoritarianism and the sanctity of free inquiry. Yet Chinese intelligence officers have been monitoring campuses across the United States using online surveillance and networks of informants; a comment in class about Taiwan or a speech about Tibet can result in retaliation against students’ relatives back home. It is difficult to imagine what meaningful academic freedom looks like when the classroom itself sits inside a country that punishes dissent as a matter of state policy.

But the crowning irony belongs to the progressive faculties that populate these institutions. These are the same campuses where students are regularly warned about the predatory nature of profit-seeking corporations, where syllabi include lengthy meditations on late-stage capitalism’s corrosive effects on human dignity. The professors who assign those syllabi are, in many cases, employed by institutions now chasing revenue streams with the unsentimental enthusiasm of a private equity firm.

Their outrage, as always, is situational. When a pharmaceutical company maximizes shareholder value, it’s evidence of systemic moral failure. When Vanderbilt absorbs a bankrupt art college and stamps its name on the resulting diploma, it’s innovation. The distinction, apparently, is who gets to keep the profits.

There is a word for selling a product under a famous name when the product itself has been materially altered. In commerce, it’s called fraud. In higher education, it’s called strategic enrollment management.

Universities have spent decades cultivating the idea that a degree from a prestigious institution represents something rare and hard-won — a credential that carries real meaning because it was genuinely difficult to obtain. Their reputations have already been tarnished by grade inflation, junk courses, and enforced viewpoint conformity, but the branch campus model further hollows out the meaning of a college degree. It’s like the Sammy Hagar iteration of Van Halen: same name, completely different object, and concert promoters who would very much prefer you not ask too many questions.