NYC college students learning ‘How to Steal’ — as class teaches ‘line between private property and public good is drawn in blood’

The value of a college degree has been called into question lately — and for good reason.

Parents might be shocked to learn what they’re paying for.

At the New School in Manhattan, a four-year private university where the $60,240 tuition doesn’t cover housing, students at the university’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts can learn “How to Steal.”

Noting the sociology seminar is not about “petty crime,” the course catalog explains it is an exploration of “the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of theft in a world where accumulation is sacred, dispossession is routine, and the line between private property and public good is drawn in blood.”

It includes field trips to “places where capital is hoarded and value is contested” — like museums, banks and even grocery stores.

I guess it’s fitting in New York, where shoplifting loot worth less than $1,000 is a mere misdemeanor. Locals don’t even bat an eye anymore at the sight of someone walking out of CVS with whatever they want.

The course catalog proudly declares that the class is a look at “radical ethics” and asks: “Is it possible to steal back what was already stolen?”

Like our city’s sense of right and wrong?

And get this: It’s a four-credit course, meaning this class alone will cost students — or their parents — an eye-watering $10,040.

Things are just as ridiculous at the Ivies. Columbia University has an entire course dedicated to the fictitious HBO series “Game of Thrones” as a way to study empires. It satisfies the Global Core component of the school’s notoriously rigorous core curriculum. 

Princeton offers “Gaming Blackness: The Anthropology of Video Games and Race,” which uses gameplay for an “experience-based exploration of video games in a global age.”

The class teaches how video games “utilize” race and expose the intersectionality of “class, gender and sexuality.” It’s hard to imagine an application outside of campus gates. But it could be helpful for those planning to return to academia to teach their own absurdity!

Yale’s “Bad Bunny: Musical Aesthetics and Politics” apparently now fulfills the school’s Humanities and Arts requirement. Whatever happened to “The Odyssey”?

Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of classes that push nonsensical progressive orthodoxy, like one at Brown called “Prison Abolition as Policy.” Students help “provide policy recommendations” and are encouraged to create TikToks about the issue.

NYU, meanwhile, offers all sorts of intersectionality-laden courses, such as “Indigenous and Latinx Speculative Film and Fiction,” “Queer Cultures” and “Disability and Sexuality in American Culture.”

To put this in perspective, Columbia’s tuition is $96,260 a year. NYU costs $96,988. Brown is even more expensive at $97,284.

Imagine owing nearly $400,000 in debt because you studied, say, “Taylor Swift and Her World” — an actual option offered to Harvard students last year.

When courses like these count towards degrees at our most prestigious schools, is it any wonder people are questioning the practical worth of higher education?

Some 23% of Americans say they have very little or no faith in it, and another 33% merely have “some,” according to a 2025 Gallup poll. Even more damning: More than half of Zoomer graduates view their degree as a waste of money, per a March Indeed survey. 

Colleges and universities have lost sight of their mission to form responsible citizens, teach them how to think, and prepare them for successful careers.

An analysis of more than a million syllabi at American universities, between 2008 and 2020, found that Karl Marx was more likely to be assigned to students than William Shakespeare or Plato. French postmodernist Michel Foucault topped Enlightenment thinkers Immanuel Kant and John Locke. Novelist Toni Morrison’s name was more prevalent than those of Aristotle, political economist John Stuart Mill, Fredrick Douglass and Niccolo Machiavelli.

There’s nothing wrong with assigning Morrison and other modern authors, but the classics shouldn’t be tossed aside to make way for them. Young people need a grasp of the texts and ideas that make Western civilization great.

But too much of the material pushed by universities — private and public alike — has become more esoteric and less applicable to the real world.

Exorbitantly expensive schools are high on their own supply if they don’t see why the outside world is suspicious of them and the value of their diplomas. How is an employer supposed to know whether you read the classics and took calculus, or played video games and dissected Bad Bunny lyrics?