One attribute that sets the U.S. higher education system apart from any in the world is the diversity of its 4,495 degree-granting institutions—big, small, private, public, religious. Under this plan, that historic diversity would melt beneath conformance. The Obama plan says it will increase the number of college graduates and contain tuition costs by “rewarding states that are willing to systematically change their higher education policies and practices.”

Random thought: Will professors at participating ObamaEd universities become subject in time to the same cost-containment rules that, say, Medicare imposes on doctors? Think it can’t happen? Better read the president’s speeches last week.

To better comprehend the origins of all this, one need only visit the White House website and read the proposal’s first sentence. Actually it’s the first half of the first sentence, which makes it clear that something other than student debt loads and repayment schedules is in play here: “Earning a postsecondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few.” A talented few?

When, since the end of World War II, has U.S. higher education been for the “talented few”? Like everything else the past four years, the economics of higher education is about to be refracted through the same lens of social antagonism Mr. Obama uses to think about pretty much everything.