U.S. News & World Report published an article today titled “Why Does College Cost So Much?” To help address that question, writer Mark I. McNutt spoke to Robert Reich, U.S. secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. Reich believes that the high costs of college are due to unnecessary spending on campus amenities and “administrative bloat.” The article concludes with a quote from Reich in which he bemoans that higher education has become, in his view, a “private investment” rather than a “public good.”

Unfortunately, Reich’s analysis and the article, save for a brief discussion of regulatory compliance costs, leave much to be desired. Absent is cause-and-effect reasoning or, as economist Thomas Sowell puts it, “thinking beyond stage one.” While the symptoms that Reich mentions are serious and deserve attention, they are just that – symptoms. They are not the causes of higher education’s turmoil.

It’s fair for Reich and others in establishment circles to believe that there exists a “market failure” necessitating government “investment” in postsecondary education. But it’s sloppy thinking and perhaps even disingenuous for them to ignore the very real governmental and political failures that exist in that realm.