The Conservative Cave
Current Events => General Discussion => Topic started by: franksolich on November 10, 2017, 05:05:13 PM
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http://nypost.com/2017/11/09/yes-its-time-to-tax-the-universities/
I think it's a good idea.
Yes, it’s time to tax the universities
We’re marking the 100th anniversary of the Communist takeover of the Russian government and the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Revolution. I’m not trying to say they’re similar, except in one respect. In both cases, the new governments that followed got a financial rescue package by breaking up the monasteries and seizing church-owned property.
Nobody wants to do that, for any of America’s religious and cultural institutions. In particular, we have the world’s best colleges and universities, and we want them to flourish. At the same time, it’s time to take a look at how to treat them under US tax law.
Colleges are financed by student tuition, private donations, government grants and the money their endowments earn when they’re invested. None of that is taxable. However, the proposed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act introduced last week would tax investment earnings for higher-education institutions with at least 500 students and endowments exceeding $100,000 per full-time student.
The $100,000 cap would exclude some prominent, less well-endowed universities such as Georgetown and NYU, but catch the academic fat cats, such as Princeton (an endowment of $2.6 million per student), Yale ($1.9 million) and Harvard ($1.8 million). In 2015, Princeton salted away investment income of $2.5 billion, tax free, in addition to what it received in tuition, donations and government grants.
That $100,000 figure sends a message. If you have all that money, relative to the number of your students, are you really an educational institution?
When you look at the state of US higher education, that’s a fair question. How about the idiot courses that are often offered, such as Oberlin’s “How to Win a Beauty Contest,” Skidmore’s “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus” or “Zombies in Popular Media” at Columbia College at Chicago?
Instead of an education, what students are getting is a kind of vocational training, where the vocation is membership in the New Class of lawyers, government aides and staffers for multi-national corporations and NGOs. It’s not humanistic education so much as training in how clever barbarians can navigate cultural signifiers in order to produce a credentialized elite.
There’s another sense in which America’s colleges have forgotten their educational mission. Increasingly, they’re plantations run by non-academic bureaucrats — the diversity officers, the associate deans for planning, the blob that lacks the scholarship to teach but possesses the power to tell scholars what to do. They’re a dumping ground for teachers who flunked scholarship and ideologues who like to boss people around.
The all-administrative university is a creature of federal funding of higher ed. Like us, other countries offer state-supported loans for university students. But unlike us, they required the universities to cap tuition as part of the bargain. We didn’t do so, and our private universities in turn took this as an excuse to run up the tab, increasing tuition fees far in excess of the rate of inflation.
The money didn’t go into better teaching or scholarship. Instead, it went into vice provosts, community engagement officers, “knowledge managers” and all-around administrative busybodies.
The Princetons, Yales and Harvards are the glories of US higher education, of course, but a tax on investment earnings isn’t going to impede their mission. Moreover, the list of super-wealthy colleges also includes the Oberlins that are resting on their endowments more than their laurels.
A college that lives off of its endowment needn’t care overmuch about what it teaches its students, which is one reason so many of them have turned themselves into political indoctrination factories.
The proposed new tax is minimal — just 1.4 percent on the college’s investment income. (Private foundations pay 2 percent.) But for America’s colleges it’s a wake-up call that Congress has them in their sights. After all, why 1.4 percent? Why not, say, the same rate that corporations pay, when what we’re taking about are business investments in both cases?
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I have to agree with you, Coach. :cheersmate:
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How about all these VP's of diversity relations, etc? Ridiculous.
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I think a far better approach would be to restructure the grants and government handouts -- let's just say for starters that the extent to which these BS academic courses exist runs in inverse proportion to the grants that are bestowed.
Of course, that means some government bureaucrat "decides" on the basis of whatever criteria his political masters are leaning toward, with little or no accountability. But it's a place to start.
I'm sick of the taxpayer footing the bill for shit that isn't taxed to begin with. And that includes the charade known as academia.
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The whole college education thing is a joke. Telling everyone they need a degree even if they can't read or write or do basic math, giving degrees for stupid stuff that you can't get a real job at needs to be stopped.
The schools and loan sharks are taking advantage of a bunch of stupid adolescents whose parents are letting them get trapped in loans that will take ages to repay for a useless education, that can't provide them with a good paying job with a future. We need to bring back vocational education in high schools and trade schools, teaching our students useful skills and trades that they can earn a good living at for their entire life with out having a huge debt is the best thing for them. It wil lalso reduce the need for foreign workers taking jobs that should be done by Americans.
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I think a far better approach would be to restructure the grants and government handouts -- let's just say for starters that the extent to which these BS academic courses exist runs in inverse proportion to the grants that are bestowed.
Of course, that means some government bureaucrat "decides" on the basis of whatever criteria his political masters are leaning toward, with little or no accountability. But it's a place to start.
I'm sick of the taxpayer footing the bill for shit that isn't taxed to begin with. And that includes the charade known as academia.
My alma mater is a prominent private University. Many of you know what school it is. Tuition, room & board is at least 4 times from when I graduated 24+ years ago. Rather ridiculous, but being a private institution it is their discretion. Other than my rather measly contribution yearly to enable buying sports tickets easier, don't mind. And I only visit there every other year.
Otherwise Eupher, I agree with you on public colleges & universities.
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How about all these VP's of diversity relations, etc? Ridiculous.
Good point -- the new bill needs a non-contributing ahole tax.
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The whole college education thing is a joke. Telling everyone they need a degree even if they can't read or write or do basic math, giving degrees for stupid stuff that you can't get a real job at needs to be stopped.
The schools and loan sharks are taking advantage of a bunch of stupid adolescents whose parents are letting them get trapped in loans that will take ages to repay for a useless education, that can't provide them with a good paying job with a future. We need to bring back vocational education in high schools and trade schools, teaching our students useful skills and trades that they can earn a good living at for their entire life with out having a huge debt is the best thing for them. It wil lalso reduce the need for foreign workers taking jobs that should be done by Americans.
I have been saying for years we need a TRUE 2-track post-HS system that values the trades as much as it does college. And I mean integrated into our society and into our government, the way higher ed is now.
A Master Plumber should be as respected as a doctor.
When a kid gets close to HS graduation, it should NOT be "where are you going to college?" But rather "college major or trade specialty?" Plumber, mechanic -- even some practical arts.