As maddening as it can be to see how liberal academics spend the wealth created by hard-working citizens, Americans should think long and hard before allowing the federal government to dominate a system of higher education that is still by all accounts the envy of the world. …

Lest taxpayers think that Mr. Obama is simply going to protect their investment in education by demanding more accountability from schools, he made it clear on Thursday that he is not driven by a desire to protect the public fisc. He also called for an expansion of his “Pay as You Earn” program, which caps student-loan payments at 10% of a borrower’s discretionary income, and then forgives the balance in 10 years if the borrower pursues a Beltway-approved job in government or a nonprofit.

Mr. Obama is trodding a well-worn political path. Politicians subsidize the purchase of a good or service, prices inevitably rise in response to this pumped-up demand, and then the pols blame the provider of the good or service for responding to the incentives the politicians created. Think housing finance and medical care. Now President Obama is attacking colleges for rationally raising tuitions and padding their payrolls in response to a subsidy machine that began in 1965.