As long as Obama and other Democrats are going to keep playing this game, Republicans need a strategy.

Daniel Oliver of The Federalist has an idea.

Forget College For Everyone: Forgive Student Loans And End Further Subsidies

Both Obama’s and Warren’s populist proposals are meant to make Republicans look like anti-learning skinflints. Two parties can play the game of giveaway. The Democrats always play it. The Republicans should play it, because if they adopt the right measures, they can drive a stake partway through the heart of liberalism—militant, secular, statist, collectivist, politically correct, (all aboard!) liberalism. What’s not to like? And if Republicans don’t play it? The Party of Bigger Government wins.

Last May, a proposal was made on this site to have the federal government forgive all student loans owed to it and pay off all student loans owed to private lenders—in return for cancelling basically all federal support to higher educational institutions. It’s a crack-a-jack idea.

There are essentially three problems with student loans. Easy-to-get loans encourage many young people (some of whom can’t possibly profit from college) to waste crucial years of their lives at an institution from which they will derive no benefit, partly because the curriculums are useless today and partly because the nature of work is changing. As many people now realize, the primary effect of student loans has been to enable colleges to raise costs, to feed their largely left-wing professoriat.

If federal grants were eliminated, some institutions would collapse, of course, but most of those would be institutions that really don’t provide any value to their students.

Students for whom college makes sense would still be able to get loans―from friends, banks, perhaps companies, and the colleges themselves―as long as they could persuade the lenders (e.g., by having decent SAT scores) that they could truly profit from college.