Hillary Clinton and America's higher education racket

It's finally here: America's first presidential election where the cost of college will be a real issue.

Predictably enough, Democrats have jumped out to what seems like an early lead. Their formula for "reform" is also no surprise: gargantuan subsidies and higher taxes. Bernie Sanders would take a cut of financial transactions to compensate for paying campuses an added $750 billion over 10 years. Hillary Clinton would tighten deduction rules for rich families to offset a decade-long spend of $350 billion.

You can surely see the Republican response coming from a mile away: Shout "taxes?!" a bunch. And then maybe just scream incoherently.

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There is, of course, a better, bolder strategy, if Republicans would only avail themselves of it: They should seize on the underlying logic of Democratic plans to reduce the costs of college, and expose the entire higher education system as the bloated rat's nest of broken promises that it is. (Of course, the risk-averse play is to avoid doing that.)

Wonks disagree about what exactly is driving today's massive, sustained increase in higher education costs. But there's a strong argument that the more money you throw at colleges, the more expensive they get. As University of Colorado, Boulder professor Paul Campos warned in The New York Times, "Far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education."

Now, you can't just solve that problem by wiping out the subsidies, which are flowing in response to colossal public demand for ever-more-valuable "college experiences." This isn't just the latest elite fetish. Americans of all stripes have become broadly convinced that their children's future will be in peril unless they attend the "best school they can get into" — a standard that now goes far beyond the substance of an education. Much in the way that more and more of us have to hit the gym even harder because more and more of us are hitting the gym, using college to "set our kids apart from the pack" has become an exhausting obsession. When everyone's fighting for an edge, the meaning of edge changes.

The result is that millions of Americans, driven by the apparent necessity of a high-priced college education, are borrowing evermore vast sums. But what they're paying for is often not worth it.

Higher education is often a giant rip-off, leaving graduates high and dry whenever the job market veers away from perfection. That's increasingly true at the top, where vanity degrees and abstract competencies don't readily convert to cash upon graduation. But it's also increasingly true at the bottom, where "for-profit" colleges and graduate programs frequently fail to deliver their students' haplessly hoped-for futures.

College's mushy middle tier isn't safe, either. The more packed with amenities and "experience" once-stolid schools become, the more enrollees must pay for anything and everything but a competitive education. Adding to the nightmare, even for those who write off the added expense as the cost of doing business to get a leg up, that advantage typically demands that they hit the reset button, signing up for law school, medical school, or (shudder) a Master's program. The competition — and the conformity — merely increase.

America's Democratic presidential candidates seem studiously ignorant of these problems, which will actually worsen if the federal government pays whatever schools charge. But the Republican contenders are in a pinch, too. Alternate policies will only nibble around the edges of the mess. Only by revealing the fraud at the heart of America's higher-education system can we achieve actual reform.

At a time when American politics are getting increasingly populist, cheaper college for all is a red herring. Instead, the very premises of the higher education racket must be rejected. Only then can we make sense of the fundamental questions that should drive the policy debate, like what counts as an education and what such a thing is worth.

Until then, sweeping schemes like Hillary Clinton's are akin to potshots at a moving target. However well-intentioned, they're likely to miss.