Even on the rare occasion Joe Biden gets something right, he still gets it wrong.

During a visit to Florida State, a student asked the vide-president if government subsidies of tuition lead to inflated tuition costs. Biden responded:

“By the way, government subsidies have impacted upon rising tuition costs. It’s a conundrum here. But if we went the way of your view of the free market route, what we would have done is we would not have done that,” the Vice President said. “We would not have increased Pell grants, for example. And there would be 9 million fewer students in college today.”

Biden admitted that government subsidies lead to higher tuition prices, but he couched it by basically saying, hey, that’s the price you pay for getting more kids into college.

This brings up two issues. One, why is that it increases prices? And two, is it really a good thing that more people go to college?

The relationship of prices, supply, and demand is not a political issue. It’s like physics—it’s neutral. It’s law, it’s math. It’s the way it is. It’s Economics 101. When supply outpaces demand, prices fall. When demand outpaces supply, prices rise.

The government artificially creates demand when it gives out cheap loans to anyone who asks for a given item. By lowering the entry barrier, more people can come in. That’s why there was a housing bubble—the elites decided that there should be more homeownership among certain groups and so anyone who wanted a house could have one. Demand surged past inventory and prices exploded before coming crashing down.

The same thing has happened with college. We want more people to go to college, so we give a cheap loan to anyone who wants one. The financial entry barrier is all but removed—yes, you’ll graduate $100,000 in debt but it doesn’t cost you anything right now. So more people can go to college, demand increases and prices explode.

Biden is right, government subsidies lead to higher prices. But he’s wrong about his second point, that it’s a good thing 9 million more people are in college than otherwise would be.

His position assumes that people are learning something useful in college. Ask most graduates how applicable their bachelor’s degree was in the field they got jobs in. They’ll tell you it really didn’t matter. College has become another 4 years of high school, where rudimentary or useless classes are taught to students who want to kill some more time before entering the real world. We need 9 million more people doing that?