Federal loans and tuition subsidies have already driven up the number of graduates. That helps employers, not workers.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have both proposed to make higher education free for all Americans. This proposal has an intuitive logic. Elementary school and high school is provided at no charge. Higher education, they argue, shouldn’t be any different, especially in an economy where a post-secondary degree is increasingly required for a middle-class job.
Moreover, if higher education had always been tuition-free, students would not have accumulated so much debt. Cancelling that debt may be expensive, but maybe that’s the price the nation has to pay for neglecting its responsibility to provide higher education to anyone who wanted it.
Yet there are reasons to suspect that this narrative gets the causation backwards. What if the problem isn’t that there are too few college graduates, but that there are too many? Maybe employers needlessly demand college degrees for jobs that don’t require advanced education simply because so many people have them. And maybe the glut of college graduates can be blamed on easy government credit, specifically an increase in undergraduate federal loan limits to $27,000 in 2008 from $17,125 in 2006.