Lumina Foundation has a mission of greatly increasing higher education “attainment” (its goal is for 60 percent of Americans to have college degrees by 2020) and no evidence that we have already oversold higher education ever gets in the way of its cheerleading. As Exhibit A, consider this piece by Lumina president Jamie Merisotis on Huffington Post. He repeats the old canard that education is “the path to prosperity in America.”

Nonsense. Having a college degree to your name is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for prosperity. Lots of people who don’t are doing well, while lots of people with degrees are struggling. Ignoring those obvious facts is essential, however, if you run an organization with a ridiculous mission.

Actually, the path to prosperity is to make the best use of your human capital. Formal education can help to do that, but the point where the cost of more seat time starts to exceed the benefit the individual derives from it varies greatly from person to person. For many people, that is short of a college degree, and much of what goes into a college degree does little or nothing to improve the person’s level of skill and knowledge.

The old central planners in the Soviet Union thought that they could boost their nation’s economy through targeted investments — steel, heavy equipment, and also education. What they didn’t understand (or couldn’t admit) is that laissez-faire allows the spontaneous order of the free market to make the best possible use of resources. Lumina is following in their footsteps, insisting that the path to prosperity is to put more and more people through the higher education mill. That can’t work either.