Joseph Thorndike of Forbes seems to think so.

Congress Should Abolish All Tax Breaks For Higher Education

College is hopelessly unaffordable. Only the very wealthy can manage to pay full freight at high-prestige private universities, and even less exalted institutions bleed their students dry. Sure, financial aid provides some help. But the bottom-line cost is still extraordinary, leaving many students and their families mired in debt.

Just this week, President Obama underscored the heavy burden of all this borrowing and called for additional college aid. “We are here today,” he said, “because we believe that in America, no hard-working young person should be priced out of a higher education.”

Despite its cost, though, college is still a good deal. According to one recent study, not going to college will cost you dearly – on the order of half a million dollars. “That’s right,” wrote David Leonhardt of The New York Times. “Over the long run, college is cheaper than free.”

But long-run value doesn’t help with short-run tuition payments. Aware of this problem, political leaders have tried to help, creating a variety of grant and loan programs to make college more affordable. And since the 1990s, they’ve used the tax code, too.

As the Center for American Progress recently observed:

The United States tax code is full of provisions designed to encourage or reward specific behaviors, such as owning a home or saving for retirement. Tax benefits for higher education are no exception: Contributions to some college savings accounts grow tax-free, college tuition is often tax deductible, and some student-loan borrowers are able to deduct the interest paid on their student loans just as they would the interest paid on their mortgage.

This sounds great. So why is college still out of reach for so many students?

Partly because those tax breaks don’t work very well. As a group, they are poorly targeted and needlessly complex. Many deliver benefits to students who would attend college even without tax assistance – yet they still fail to provide adequate help for those in real need.