Solving the problem, however, won’t be easy. Americans and their elected leaders have grown used to discussing college “affordability” as a matter of distributing ever more government aid — in the form of tax breaks, direct assistance or subsidized loans.

Actually, this is self-defeating: by making it possible for students to pay higher tuition, federal and state aid reduces institutions’ incentive to make the hard budgetary choices that might hold tuition down in the first place.

Management got so loosey-goosey at Minnesota, the Journal reports, that the school had no idea of such basic facts as how many employees report to each supervisor.

In other words, the ultimate beneficiaries of all those government tuition subsidies are the highly paid administrators and faculty members whose hiring, and retention, it enables.