New Atlantic column: The case for a Federal University System

My new column in the Atlantic makes the case that we should establish a Federal University System in parallel to the state and private systems we already have. Excerpts:

[T]he price of college is high. And attendance has been growing...When you have increasing price and increasing quantity sold, Econ 101 tells you that what you're seeing is a shift in the demand curve. Lots more people want to go to college, and they are willing to pay more. The reason for the increase is not surprising -- it's the college wage premium, combined with low unemployment among people with a college degree... 

And we can only expect demand to increase, especially if we do what we ought to do and let in a lot more high-skilled immigrants. Those immigrants will be great for the economy, but their kids are going to be competing with native-born kids for college spots. Unless we do something, that competition could cause a xenophobic backlash among the high-skilled native-born, as well as driving up tuition even further. 

What do you do when you have a big increase in demand for a product? Well, if you're a company, you probably ramp up supply... 

So here's my idea for increasing the supply of college: A system of federal universities...
Federal university systems have been very successful in other countries. One prime example is the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT)...Another example is Japan's federal university system... 

A system of national universities would (1) fight the rise in tuition, and (2) accommodate all those smart second-generation kids whose parents we should be recruiting to our country in droves. But it will also help the nation in a 3rd way by giving us an outlet for higher research spending. The U.S. has been spending less and less on R&D as a percentage of our GDP, even as R&D becomes more and more important. In part because of this, there are legions of PhDs being forced to take private-sector jobs in which they have no expertise. These trends need to be reversed in order to maintain America's status as the leading technological nation. And a system of federal universities is the perfect vehicle to increase research spending and provide an outlet for all those PhDs... 

Federal universities are an idea whose time has come.