Is It Time To Tax The Ivy League?
The elite universities have endowments worth billions.
The Wall Street Journal reports.
Is Taxing Harvard, Yale and Stanford the Answer to Rising College Costs?
Lawmakers have a new solution for the high cost of college: Make the wealthiest universities pay for it.
Elite U.S. schools have grown richer since the 2008 financial crisis by investing their endowment money in everything from California vineyards to Chinese startups. State and federal policy makers now want to tax those profits—or force the wealthiest schools to spend down their endowments—to defray soaring student bills and refill depleted higher-education budgets.
“College costs have outpaced health-care inflation, and at the same time, there’s this benefit for endowments,” said Rep. Peter Roskam (R., Ill.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight, complaining in an interview about the funds’ tax-free status. “I don’t want to assert a conclusion, but let’s put this in the ‘I’m just saying’ category.”
Is Taxing Harvard, Yale and Stanford the Answer to Rising College Costs? (The Wall Street Journal)
Comments
You don’t need to tax the schools, just go with a two pronged approach:
A: make student loans dischargable upon bankruptsy.
B: make the university the student attended a guarantor on the loans.
This will cause the universities to think twice about accepting a loan-only student for underwater basket weaving and will prune out departments built around entirely economically useless disciplines like grievence studies.