American higher education is in crisis. Pathologies that had been growing for decades and were catalyzed by Covid mania burst into the open after Hamas’s attack on Israel. As financier-activist and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman wrote following Claudine Gay’s resignation, anti-Semitism tends to erupt where political cultures decay. At many “elite” universities, that decay has taken the form of ideological indoctrination, academic corruption, racial discrimination, and contempt for broader society. These institutions have compromised their basic pedagogical and research missions, along with core values like free speech, due process, and equality under law.

Yet while legacy universities dominate headlines, a transformation is taking place elsewhere, and it deserves more attention. Students are voting with their feet, abandoning the “colds and scolds” of the Northeast for more favorable climates—both intellectual and meteorological.

This shift has extended to both public and private schools. Today, it’s harder to get into the University of Florida as an out-of-state applicant than it was to get into most Ivy League schools 30 years ago, and institutions like Vanderbilt and Rice show that private universities need not be out of touch.

Combined with threatened funding cuts to woke universities, this trend could signal a north-to-south brain drain. As the Independent Women’s Forum’s Neeraja Deshpande has noted, “science programs in red states could begin to catch up in their recruitment of elite faculty—especially if the federal funding once funneled to Harvard or Columbia gets redirected to state universities like those in Tennessee or Florida.” Lower living costs and lighter regulatory burdens in the Sun Belt—particularly for businesses and tech firms hiring graduates—could further accelerate the migration.