The Chronicle reported today on an economics professor at Ohio University that says college is overfunded and opposes the Higher Education Act. In fact Richard K. Vedder founded the deceptively named Center for College Affordability & Productivity that has a mission of seeing how "forces of the market can be used to make higher education more affordable and qualitatively better." In short, they want to cut off public funding to colleges and universities, privatize them, and leave students to pay the price.

I'm not an economist, but this doesn't really make sense to me. There are for-profit colleges, but these colleges don't really provide the same education provided at non-profit universities. I think we'd agree that college tends to be overpriced -- with tuition going up in double-digit percentage points in some recent years, but the reason is to make up for the lack of state funding. If we cut this to zero, student would be taking on the whole of the burden. That'd be fine for people that could afford it, but it would really solidify a class divide in this country.