A Discussion Worthy Comment, please excuse the rant.

Bradley:

"Nice post.
I'd like to question the conventional wisdom about higher education subsidies. What I mean is, does America really need cheaper higher education? Everybody and their mother already goes to college, and many college students are apathetic trust-fund twats that get legitimately little out of their education. All this says is that the private school system is healthy and proper as a money-making venture. If anything, private schools should be more authoritarian and selective in order to ensure that only people who are ready get into college. High-school minded slacker non-contributors should get acquainted with life beforehand.
The only conclusion is obvious: we need aid for those that need aid. The government provides some but could provide more. As you pointed out, gov intervention in private higher education would handicap the positive economic impact.
One last point: The fact that the income gap in the US has grown over the last 3 decades and that its higher than almost any other large industrialized country indicates that our higher-education saturation strategy is not effective."

You raise some interesting points. I would tend to agree with you in that I understand your point to be that higher education should not be cheaper on a wholesale level but for the people who are ready to take on the challenge and responsibility of their education. What I think you perhaps need to think of or at least express if you have thought of it is that, while higher education is a privilege and a responsibility, education, period, is a basic right in a developed country such as ours (and something to strive for elsewhere). Thus, yes, people who don't get anything out of their education probably are at too high a level of education and money should not be wasted subsidizing their attending college. However, this says something about our elementary and secondary level educational system and how little it prepares so many people for the higher education they want (perhaps for the wrong reasons - they see a degree as only a means to an increased paycheck, and see it as a chore, something they just have to do without thinking of why they have to do it.) to pursue. This problem exists, not only in the culture of "trust fund twats," as you put it, but in and due to insufficient inner city and even other public schools and due to parents who are too unconcerned or uninvolved with their childrens's education. In fact, I think that the parenting probably plays the largest role in the matter, in that parents should raise their kids to have a good attitude towards learning. Parents need to have high standards for their children and, an often neglected point, for themselves. A child with intellectual parents are more likely to be intellectual themselves just by virtue of the nature and the amount of discussions and language they hear in the home. Parents who simply demand their kids get high grades don't even do enough; they need to instill values in their children that will mark them as people who will appreciate the opportunities afforded them, enjoy reflection and creativity, and honor, in themselves and in others, the pursuit of knowledge and skills. One of the the teachers I most respected and enjoyed in high school, Mr. Thurber, hated "grade grubbing." He understood that, too much, grades have become a measure unto themselves instead of what they should be - a means to evaluation. In effect, people who care more about a grade than what the grade evaluates defeat the true purpose of their education.
One thing that strikes me about government intervention in higher education is that they could be infringing upon the competitiveness of colleges and crippling these institutions' ability to find and recruit the best possible student bodies they can based on intellectualism, skills, individuality and differing perspectives. I say to the government: leave higher education alone, get your hands dirty working to improve elementary and secondary education. And an aside, if you look at the video I posted in my first post (not the drum one) it mentions that Nintendo spends much more on marketing and research than we spend on education. That simple fact tells me that our government's spending priorities are seriously askew. I won't get into how much the government should and should not spend in total but it needs to change the direction they're sending their cash. Ultimately, my response to your intial question, Bradley, is not that we need to prevent the expansion of the population that pursues a higher education but that we need to prepare more of the people who pursue one.

Cheers!