GOVERNMENT OF, BY, AND FOR THE ONE PERCENT: Clinton’s Student Loan Plan: Subsidies for Stanford Graduates.

Hillary Clinton, multimillionaire politician, Davos-guest extraordinaire, and giver-of-speeches to Goldman Sachs, is reportedly worried that she is not in tune with the populist mood of the electorate—and understandably so. But her latest student loan initiative—essentially, a targeted subsidy for the most successful college graduates—doesn’t seem particularly likely to help repair her image of among voters who feel that the system is rigged in favor of connected elites. . . .

The real losers from America’s dysfunctional student loan system are not young CEOs, but marginal and disadvantaged students who are often pushed by federal subsidies into programs they can’t complete or can’t afford. The overwhelming majority of the students in default on their federal loans went to third-tier or for-profit institutions or failed to graduate altogether. Graduates with the skills and social resources needed to incorporate a successful company are not in need of an expensive bailout.

Moreover, as Preston Cooper argues at Economics21, Clinton’s promise to give special treatment to the loans of graduates who work at vaguely-defined “socially impactful” companies is practically an invitation to cronyism. “In all likelihood, this provision would be used subjectively by Washington bureaucrats to reward the owners of favored businesses, while implicitly punishing those who fall outside the privileged category,” he writes.

Any serious policy for reducing Americans’ student loan burden should focus on bringing down the cost of college. That means shaking up the accreditation system to encourage more competition and forcing colleges to have skin in the game if their students can’t pay back their loans. It also probably means that the federal government should rein in its free-flowing loans and make more room for private lenders. Further expanding subsidies while creating exemptions and carveouts for favored interests is a regressive approach that will just make higher education more expensive and more unfair.

But the higher-ed industry is one of the Democrats’ most important constituencies, a tremendous source of money, foot soldiers, and propaganda. Why would they want to streamline it? If students suffer, well, omelets, eggs, etc.