Read: Here’s how higher education dies

The higher-education sector is more and more threatened by growing numbers of graduates whose diplomas are not the golden tickets they had hoped for. A report prepared by my Manhattan Institute colleague Oren Cass observes that 41 percent of bachelor’s-degree holders work in jobs for which their degrees are unnecessary. Even people who graduate with a coveted STEM degree are facing challenges in the labor market. A report prepared by Hal Salzman, Daniel Kuehn, and B. Lindsay Lowell found that half of STEM grads move into non-STEM fields, and a third of these lane-switchers say they pivoted because their preferred field lacked opportunities. Broadly speaking, the wage premium conferred by a college education has not risen since the start of the century, and the bottom quarter of bachelor’s-degree holders have seen their wages fall below those of the average high-school graduate.

Colleges nervous about these lackluster outcomes must also must contend with unfavorable demographic trends. America saw a brief spike in births in the 1980s and ’90s as the large Baby Boomer generation reached its prime childbearing years, but has witnessed a precipitous decline in the years since. Writing in Bloomberg, Justin Fox describes how colleges survived previous demographic dips because of growth in the share of graduating high-school seniors drawn onto campus by the growing college-wage premium.

With that incentive dulled, America’s many non-elite colleges, universities, and community colleges are expecting their enrollment numbers to begin to decline in the middle of the next decade. That is, unless a large-hearted politician from one of New England’s most charming college towns can push through a bill to dramatically subsidize the cost of attending these schools.

As for college-skeptical Republicans, who now find themselves firmly on the other side of the diploma divide from their Democratic counterparts, their political imperative is rather different. With their growing reliance on the votes of non-college-educated adults, and in particular non-college-educated men, they have much to gain by dislodging higher education from its lofty position as the gatekeeper of middle-class prosperity. Hawley’s proposed legislation represents an effort to capitalize on this opportunity, but there is more that could be done.

According to higher-education critics on the right, the problem with America’s current approach to post-secondary education is that it channels the lion’s share of resources to colleges, which service a relatively privileged third of the country, while the remaining two-thirds of Americans are left to fend for themselves without the funding or training necessary to acquire a skill that offers an attractive wage in our globalized economy. What’s more, at some point along the way, the value of college became divorced from skill acquisition, to the point where 61 percent of employers told researchers at Harvard Business School that they turned away employees who possessed the requisite skills and experiences for job openings simply because they did not have a diploma, as Hess and Addison report in a recent essay in National Affairs.