National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on Tuesday’s edition of The Editors, said we’ve not yet seen a “reduction” in the “benefit of going to a famous university,” but it could be coming. And he argued that this will only compound the problems with programs that transfer student debt to taxpayers.

“I’ve been writing for a long time,” Cooke said, “asking the question, ‘Is it obvious to anyone that the people who come out of Harvard and Yale and Princeton and, yes, Oxford are necessarily impressive?’ . . . And I don’t think that there is.”

Cooke said the question “does depend on what you’re studying. . . . But I do think we’re beginning to see that shift. And in some sense, the student-loan question that we’ve talked a lot about, and that animates me, is related to this, because that is a problem that has resulted from the universities not providing the value that students have been told or expected that they would.

“If, for example,” Cooke said, “the NFL became boring, you could for a while fix it with subsidies and encourage people to go and watch it at a price that they didn’t bear themselves. But it wouldn’t work forever. Eventually, the sport would die.

“You cannot bail out an industry that doesn’t do what it says it will do forever.”

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