Reason.tv explains why we shouldn't be trying to fund (i.e., indebt ourselves further) ever more college access. The video notes that nationally, four-year colleges and universities only graduate 53% of freshman after six years (here's a CNN piece with a lot more detail on that), parses the cost of new Pell grant entitlements, strongly suggests that sending still more people to college is going to water down the degree* still further (especially if we want to improve the graduation rate), and asks us to rethink the whole thing.

I agree. And another thing: before we start fetishizing sending people to college, maybe we should focus on making sure they graduate from high school--and that the diploma actually means something. Nationwide, we only graduate about 70 percent of high school students. For minority kids, the figures are under 60 percent. In cities, it's 53 percent; in suburbs, 71 percent. And in some places, it's far worse: in Cleveland, only 38 percent of urban kids graduate in four years. In New York, 54 percent of urban kids graduate in four years (83 percent of suburban kids do). Indianapolis, where I grew up, and where David Letterman also grew up, has the worst numbers of all: only 30 percent of urban freshmen graduate on time. The line dividing the urban school district from the township ran through our house. We went to the township schools.

*On watering down the degree:

Nearly half of college freshmen who drink alcohol spend more time drinking each week than they do studying, suggests a survey involving more than 30,000 first-year students on 76 campuses who took an online alcohol education course last fall.

Students who said they had at least one drink in the past 14 days spent an average 10.2 hours a week drinking, and averaged about 8.4 hours a week studying, according to findings being presented today at a conference in Seattle for campus student affairs officials. Nearly 70% of respondents (20,801 students) said they drank. Of those, 49.4% spent more time drinking than studying.