LogFAQs > #967536522

masterplum posted...

Quick math, Harvard has 23,000 students and costa 76,000 a year including room and board.

You could make all education free including room and board for 31 years with that endowment (And thats assuming the cost of providing the education is equal to tuition which we know it isnt) Dont include room and board and you could easily pay for everything with the interest from the endowment

Harvard should be free

Endowments are a problem that Congress probably needs to address. The way non-profit status works, the donated funds have to be used for non-profit purposes, so they can't cash out the endowments and distribute them. But when your endowment is $53B, you don't have any non-profit uses that would make a dent in that. So the money just keeps getting invested and growing ever larger and larger. It's a black hole of money, really.

The donors also don't understand this - they think they are donating money for a good cause when they are actually dumping their money into a black hole where it will never be used for any purpose other than investment.

I think the solution is to end the non-profit status of colleges in general and tax them on tuition received. Well, a softer option would be to tax them like any other corporation - on income - but if you wanted to get more aggressive you could directly tax tuition and fees.*

*There is some question about constitutionality I suppose with this approach since the 16th Amendment only authorizes direct income taxes and schools could argue they are losing money and hence have no income to tax. There is a federal gas tax which is per gallon though so maybe it would be okay. What I really want is a progressive tax based on the amount of tuition so that a public university charging a few thousand a year on tuition doesn't pay much tax but schools charging 60k or whatever it is they are charging now have to fork over a very significant amount of that. You can use the money to create a fund to directly refund students.