In this September 19 post, Kevin Williamson took issue with my contention that the American higher education system is not the envy of the world, then upbraided me for engaging in what he terms “lazy libertarianism.” I feel the need to reply.

What I wrote in this article published by my employer, the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (and I thank Williamson for his good words on our continuing efforts at exposing the many flaws in American postsecondary education) is that our system is not the envy of the world. I have been making that argument for more than twenty years, as I look at the high cost and low educational value of our higher education system generally.


Williamson says I’m wrong because so many students from around the world come to the U.S. to study. That is true — about one million foreign students are enrolled in our colleges and university. But it is also true that around 300,000 American students are enrolled in colleges and universities around the world. Thus, a far higher percentage of Americans choose to study abroad than do foreigners choose to study here. Does that prove he’s wrong and I’m right?

No. The decisions those individuals make tell us nothing about the overall merits of any country’s higher education system. America has many superb educational programs. Some brilliant foreign students want to study physics, for example, at M.I.T. or Cal Tech; many dull foreign students from rich families also come to easy schools here because it’s a sign of prestige to hold an American degree, no matter that daddy bought a place for them by paying full tuition.


What is excellent about American higher education has nothing to do with our higher ed policy. Our great institutions were great long before the federal government started to meddle in higher education and have remained so despite more than 50 years of harmful intervention. On the other hand, what is bad about our colleges and universities is the result of federal subsidies and regulations. That was the argument I made in my article — just as in all other markets, when politicians start making decisions, the consequences are almost certain to be bad.


Therefore, I argued that if a nation wants its education system to be the best it can be, the right policy to pursue is laissez-faire. It should, in other words, leave the education decisions in the hands of people who will pay the cost, reaping the benefits if they choose wisely and suffering the losses if they don’t. Williamson himself has advocated the radical step of eliminating federal student loans, which would take us most of the way back to the overwhelmingly laissez-faire days before LBJ made higher education a federal priority. I cannot see that there is any useful (or constitutional) role for the federal government and advocate its complete withdrawal.


But because I did not offer a thorough case for that, Williamson says I’m guilty of “lazy libertarianism.” Who among us, however, has never said, “The government should never have gotten involved with X,” without following up with a complete case against government meddling? I did note in my article that American higher education was of mostly of good quality and quite affordable prior to federal intervention, but that apparently was not enough for me to escape the charge.

Well, I think that I made a prima facie case for keeping government out of higher education and am ready to elaborate on that case to anyone who believes that government intervention can make it better. Laissez-faire won’t give us perfection, but it avoids the deep, ingrained imperfections that government inevitably causes.