As the Martin Center has been arguing for its entire existence, American higher ed costs far too much and delivers far too little benefit — thanks to government meddling.

A new book says that it’s even worse than we think, and I review it today for the Center.

The book, edited by Kevin Roberts of Heritage Foundation, brings together essays by many critics of our higher ed system.

A thread running through the book is that our colleges and universities have lost their sense of mission. That’s a point made by Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn, who says that most of them have turned education into something more like a manufacturing operation, just trying to process through as many bodies as possible, to collect as much money as they can.

Our governmental higher education financing system, with easy money for everyone, comes in for severe criticism. Preston Cooper writes, “For too long, colleges have taken advantage of an opaque and dysfunctional financial-aid system to strong-arm students into paying higher tuition than they would in a free and competitive market.” Right — any time you supplant the market with government, you get bad results.

How about the quality of education that college students receive? It has been dumbed down to accommodate the large numbers of high school grad who are neither well prepared for nor much interested in anything like real college work. And our accreditation system has done nothing to arrest that trend.

The rampant politicization of higher education is another point of criticism. Many college leaders are imbued with leftist ideology, and their institutions help promote it. As George Harne writes, “Unfortunately, leaders of colleges and universities frequently derive their leadership not from the natures and highest purposes of their institutions but from the worlds of leftwing politics, moralistic-therapeutic culture, the corporate book trade, or some combination of the three.”

And the faculty, of course, mirror the politics and activism of college leaders. The system for choosing them filters out serious scholars in favor of those who will push radical, “progressive” ideas. That includes antisemitism, which has made an ugly comeback on our campuses, since so many faculty members have absorbed the notion that Israel is a terrible “settler colonialist” nation that deserves to be eliminated.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a broad appraisal of the problems that beset our higher education system.