The latest print edition of National Review includes the following blurb:
The Democrats like to describe themselves as the “party of science” — but the dismal one remains an eternal stepchild. Consider Hillary Clinton’s predictably over-egged student-debt agenda, which adamantly refuses to address the reality that subsidies, whatever their stated intent, drive up prices rather than lower them. Never mind that a substantial body of research, including a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has found that federal subsidies (mainly in the form of discounted loans) are an important driver of the mind-bending rise in college costs. Mrs. Clinton has an answer: More subsidies and, added bonus, more regulations, which would treat colleges roughly the way Obamacare treats insurance companies. That’s what happens when you’re trying to pay off both sides of a transaction with a third party’s money. Mrs. Clinton proposes retroactively lowering already discounted interest rates even further for some graduates, which would be simply a large wealth transfer to a group that already has above-average incomes. Colleges will be financially rewarded if they offer “no-loan” tuition rates — confirmed as such by Washington, of course — at four-year colleges and two years of “free” (presumably, somebody’s going to pay the professors) community college. I.e., we will be paying the colleges more to charge less. Swelling administrative budgets — and the campus waterpark at Texas Tech — suggest that colleges will find creative ways to absorb whatever money is thrown their way, which suggests one obvious reform: Stop doing that.
