University Dues

Hit them where it hurts:

There are at least a dozen schools bulging with $10 billion endowments, and scores more with more than $1 billion each. We should call these schools Loophole U. What public purpose is advanced by these storehouses of wealth? Harvard's $50 billion-plus endowment is so large that the school could charge free tuition to every student from now until kingdom come -- and still not run out of money. Yet Harvard still charges nearly $100,000 a year for tuition and room and board. But this is the real sin of this unworthy tax loophole. Even with these giant endowments, college tuitions have been rising at two to three times the rate of inflation. The argument that tax-free donations make colleges more affordable has proven to be patently false. The bigger the endowment, the more the schools charge students and their parents -- and taxpayers. Richard Vedder, a widely respected economist at Ohio University, notes that one of the most regressive tax policies is subsidies to billion-dollar universities. It only makes the rich richer.

Time to end their gravy train...