This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 7, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama is making his higher education plans known, but rather than allowing

higher ed prices to come down by getting the

feds out of higher ed the president is hoping some small time price controls

will do the trick. So says Neil McCluskey associate Associate Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.

In the state that you need address, basically what the president said about higher education was

correctly that the price is too high, it goes up too fast.

And he spoke just vaguely about doing something to punish schools that raise their tuition

prices too quickly or too high.

I didn't give any real details on that.

And did talk about, of course, we need to expand student aid, work study,

things like that, so that we can defray the cost of college.

Unfortunately he didn't give any acknowledgement of the very basic reality, which is the more

age you put out there, the more schools can raise their prices, because the last thing you want is to

think it's the federal policy that's the problem not the solution.

But he did sort of say we can't just keep handing out money to higher education, we can't afford it, we'll go broke.

He did say that in the State Union address.

Yeah, he said that.

So he acknowledged there is eventually some limit on the Earth's resources that we can put into sending kids

to college.

But he didn't give any indication of how he'd stop it, but he gave a speech of the University

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