The Case for Taxing Harvard
Posted on May 19th, 2008 in Uncategorized |
Economist James D. Miller makes it on InsideHigherEd.com.
A tax on elite colleges would reduce inequality. Students who attend top schools have vastly higher lifetime incomes than other Americans do. And even if the tax reduced financial aid and so increased student borrowing, it would still reduce inequality because those who graduate from elite schools with large debts are much better off financially than are their peers who do not attend college.
That strikes me as a wildly unconvincing reason to tax a non-profit. Then again, the question is really whether Harvard should still be considered a non-profit institution…..
3 Responses
It’s just lazy to say you find something ‘unconvincing.’ Say WHY.
This is unconvincing, at least in this excerpt, because it ignores the fact that reduced financial aid (if it happened) would change the makeup of the group that goes on to such high incomes. In other words, reduced financial aid would increase inequality for precisely the demographic reasons mentioned here.
But I haven’t read the whole piece so maybe this guy is smarter than your excerpting of him would suggest.
Under Mr. Miller’s plan, only wealthy students would be able to attend the top universities, thereby increasing inequality. With few exceptions (business, accounting and economic students), very few undergrads enter jobs making more than $30K a year. An undergrad college education — without financial aid — at a top university costs more than $200K. Tack on the interest and they schools have only created a class of indentured servants.
The basis of this argument (and of most of the attacks on endowment “hoarding”) is that Harvard and other universities provide education to students and nothing more. It’s overdue for Harvard to change this public conception of universities and demonstrate all of the ways in which university-based research helps society far beyond the student body.