The incomparable Walter Russell Mead points to a major problem that is burdening an entire generation with unsustainable debt: higher education subsidization. That may seem counterintuitive, but it really is crushing the hopes of a generation. Mead asserts:

The student loan system’s biggest victims are exactly the people policy makers most want to help: marginal students whose chances of finishing are not great. There are at least three perverse consequences to our policies:

• Federal support and available loans push up the costs of higher ed. Free money distorts the market in a big way.
   
• Policy aimed at making college degrees more common increases the disadvantage for those who do not have or are unable to earn these degrees, and it adds to the pressure on everyone to at least give college a try.
   
• When students fail at college, student loans become a permanent ball and chain for workers stuck at the low end of the labor market.

This situation has also been noted by Dr. Richard Vedder from Ohio University. In a recent piece for Hillsdale College’s Imprimis newsletter, Vedder articulated how much debt many students are becoming saddled with while also noting that it is not only young people that are being entangled in this debt trap,

The Pell Grant program did much more than double in size between 2007 and 2010. Although it was designed to help poor people, it is now becoming a middle class entitlement. Student loans have been growing eight to ten percent a year for at least two decades, and, as is well publicized, now aggregate to one trillion dollars of debt outstanding—roughly $25,000 on average for the 40,000,000 holders of the debt. Astoundingly, student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt.

Nor is it correct to assume that most of this debt is held by young people in their twenties and early thirties. The median age of those with loan obligations today is around 33, and approximately 40 percent of the debt is held by people 40 years of age or older. So when politicians talk about maintaining low interest loans to help kids in college, more often than not the help is going to middle-aged individuals long gone from the halls of academia.

The irony of this situation is that the very best of intentions can often go astray. In this case, there was a clear desire to help many people to rise up and acquire a ticket into a solid middle class existence. However, what it has ended up doing is raising costs and saddling young people not only with debt, but, often, degrees that won’t translate into nearly enough earning potential to allow them to retain any reasonable hope of paying that debt off.

This is a slow moving disaster. It is high time that we fundamentally reconsider the negative effects that our subsidization of higher education has wrought.