This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 11, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Why does university education continue to rise in cost

when the applicability of a college degree is more debatable than ever.

George Leif is director of research for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education

Policy.

We spoke after the Cato Forum taking control of spiraling college costs held October 6th.

You can watch the full event at Cato.org.

If there is to be one, what do you think the federal role should be in higher education funding or establishing any type of standard or evaluating universities?

None of the above. The Constitution does not give the federal government any authority with respect to higher education or education at all

And we'd be a lot better off if the government had not gotten involved in higher education or running K-12 or anything else.

Unfortunately, the federal politician decided long ago that they had to start making higher education more available to people by giving them

grants and subsidize loans to go to college.

And a problem with that is that it is distorted the decision-making

process so people don't bear the full cost of their choice on going to college.

Therefore, many more people I think have gone to college and otherwise would have.

And a consequence of that is we have such a glut of people in the labor force now with college

credentials, that employers start to look at college credentials

as a screening device and saying, well, we won't even

consider people who don't have college credentials.

A good example I came across recently is enterprise Rent-A-Car won't even consider hiring people to run their rental car desks and hand out the keys to people unless you have a college degree.

So now we have this incredible degree inflation and pressure for people to go to college,

...