Megan McArdle nails it on Bloomberg View.
Higher education is becoming the ginseng of the policy world: a sort of all-purpose snake oil for solving any problem you’d care to name, as long as we consume enough of it.
Her discussion of President Obama’s free-community-college tuition gambit is very solid, and she links to others’ comments.
President Obama was politically smart to bring up this idea, since it drew attention away from bad policies. But at least some people are seeing through this fluttering bit of emperor’s clothing.