"Legal" rackets have two essential components: a public-relations "cover" that obscures the racket and the mechanism that extracts the wealth from the "marks." The Higher Education Racket qualifies on both counts:

1. The PR cover is "you all need a college diploma, and we're here to make that happen." Yea for more education!

2. The extraction mechanism is student loans. Here's a chart that shows what happened relatively recently: your federal government began guaranteeing obscene profits to student-loan lenders and debt-serfdom for tens of millions of "marks" i.e. students.