This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 30, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

Just as many Americans are openly debating the value of a college degree, the federal government appears to be doubling down on that value, keeping interest rates

on student loans nice and low, even if an individual's investment in higher ed is unlikely to pay

off.

Neil McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cato Institute's Center for

Educational Freedom, comments.

In 2007, the federal government passed a law that reduced over five years in half the interest rate on federal subsidize

loans from 6.8% down to 3.4%. And that is set to expire July 1st if Congress doesn't act. So once immediately got people's

attention in Washington DC and what the president went on a three-state three

college tour to discuss recently was we can't let this rate double and Congress isn't doing anything about it

and therefore Republicans don't care and on and on but basically saying if we don't do

this college will be even more unaffordable and that's not acceptable and I will fix it. The point from President Obama's perspective is, look, we just need to get a lot more people going to college.

This is a popular sentiment among older voters, among younger voters who hope to go to college,

and Romney seems to be playing into that as well.

Yeah, so the overall message here is that, right, education is good, therefore more education is really good.

And so the argument basically reduces to the federal government should spend really untold amounts of money getting people

to go to college, helping them pay for college.

And that makes sense on some level, I mean, you invest in human capital, and that's important.

Human capital is a very important thing in economic growth and obviously for that individual.

But just as food is important, you could eat twinkies all day, 24 hours a day.

You could eat anything all day for 24 hours a day you could eat anything all day for 24 hours a day and rather

than getting healthier you die and what we see in higher education is very clearly

...