Wisconsin’s governor Scott Walker fought the nasty public unions back in 2011 and survived the war. Now he has dared to suggest that the University of Wisconsin system costs too much and educates too little. In this new Forbes piece, Tom Lindsay praises Walker’s stance and quotes some people who can’t be dismissed as having a conservative political angle. For instance, former Harvard president Derek Bok who wrote in his book Our Underperforming Colleges that many of today’s grads have not learned “to write well enough to satisfy their employers and reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems.”

Governor Walker has the right instincts and I hope he will sharpen his arguments against the higher education status quo. I’d like to see him stress that, thanks to government interference, college now costs way more than it needs to, while giving many students an experience with scant educational benefit.