I cannot think of a market that is more dysfunctional in America right now than education. Total student debt topped $1.5tn this year and a Brookings study found that nearly 40 per cent of those borrowers are likely to default on their loans by 2023.
Some of the borrowers will have attended predatory for-profit colleges, for which the Trump administration recently loosened regulations.
The imprimatur of a $75,000 Harvard degree is in such demand that the school is now being sued by a group of Asian-American students who say more of them should be allowed in on the basis of high test scores. But at the other end of the spectrum, several new studies show that a garden variety four-year degree isn’t paying off the way it used to. One recent survey found that 43 per cent of college grads are underemployed.