For decades, politicians like Barack Obama have been pushing higher education as the solution to just about all our problems: it makes society more equal, it increases our ability to compete in the world, it makes the population healthier and more civic-minded. It’s the miracle cure and all the government needs to do is subsidize it more, so everyone has “access.”
Professor Robert Weissberg is one of the dissidents who understands that what these years of federal meddling have done is to undermine real education while making it more expensive. He makes a strong argument in this piece published on Family Security Matters.
The conventional wisdom has it that America is so prosperous because we invest so much in education for our people, but the truth is the other way around. It’s only because America is prosperous that we can afford to have such an expensive and ineffectual higher education system.
