The thing is, today’s graduates aren’t just entering an especially brutal economy. They’re entering it in many cases with the wrong portfolios. To wit: as a country we routinely grant special visas to highly educated workers from countries like China and India. They possess scientific and technical skills that American companies need but that not enough American students are acquiring.

Image Frank Bruni Credit... Earl Wilson/The New York Times

“That’s why there are all these kinds of initiatives to make math and science fun,” Stephen J. Rose, a senior economist at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, reminded me last week. He was referring to elementary and high school attempts to prime more American students for college majors in those areas and for sectors of the job market where positions are more plentiful and lucrative. The center issued a report last year that noted that “not all bachelor’s degrees are the same” and that “while going to college is undoubtedly a wise decision, what you take while you’re there matters a lot, too.”

A wider world of competition now confronts college graduates. A front-page article in The Wall Street Journal last week cited data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to note: “Thirty years ago, the U.S. led the world in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with the equivalent of at least a two-year degree; only Canada and Israel were close. As of 2009, the U.S. lagged behind 14 other developed countries.”

That situation isn’t helped by the cost of higher education, which has escalated wildly over the last three decades and has left too many students with crippling Everests of debt. In light of the daunting financial calculus of college today, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, recently introduced a bill that would prod the federal government to disseminate statistics about the graduation rates, incomes, debt levels and such for people who pursue different courses of study at different schools.

“The focus has always been on access,” Wyden told me. “Just get to college. Find a way in the door.” But today, he said, students facing “an incredibly tough job market” need to know “how their particular program will stack up and what kind of debt they’re going to rack up.” I’d go even further than he does and call for government and university incentives to steer students into the fields of studies that will serve them and society best. We use taxes to influence behavior. Why not student aid?

That you can’t gain a competitive edge with just any diploma from just any college is reflected in the ferociousness of the race to get into elite universities. It’s madness out there. Tiger mothers and $125-an-hour tutors proliferate, and parents scrimp and struggle to pay up to $40,000 a year in tuition to private secondary schools that then put them on the spot for supplemental donations, lest the soccer field turn brown and the Latin club languish. The two Americas are evident in education as perhaps nowhere else.

Trying to keep higher learning as affordable as possible is a crucial effort to collapse that divide. No good can come from letting college — as a goal, as an option — slip away. But as a guarantor of a certain quality of life, it already has. And we need to look at a whole lot more than loan rates to fix the problem.