“Too many people are going to college,” writes my American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray. That’s not a response to the mob of students that attacked him and the liberal professor who had invited him to speak back in March at Middlebury College. It’s the title of the third chapter in his 2008 book Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality.

Since Murray wrote those words, higher-education enrollment has in fact declined, from 20.6 million in 2011 to 19 million in 2006, according to Ohio University economists Richard Vedder and Justin Stehle writing in the Wall Street Journal. That 8 percent drop is concentrated in community colleges and for-profit schools.