Reply to The New America: Elite Privates forever out of reach for UMC?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The other thing is that the benefit of universities is not just to an individual that attends--the number of scientific discoveries that are required to be made public, the scholarship on key issues, policy and economic analyses.    
Sure some  academic scholarship may be arcane and esoteric, but in sum, universities have contributed a lot of to our understanding and functioning of the world.  They train the people who make the world run.  This idea of education as merely a private good, a private luxury is so problematic.

Private companies take that knowledge, design something based on it, patent it, keep it secret and charge a fortune.  Their R&D is highly protected while university researchers are required to share everything.  The US is getting a lot for it's fairly minimal investment in higher ed.[/quote]

An education at $80,000 a year is a private luxury.  Many public universities that charge way less have incredible research components.  Education is not a private good, but education at $80,000 is a private good.  These universities have increased their tuition well beyond inflation, despite the benefits they receive from their tax exempt status.  I think it's time to reassess whether they are providing benefits to society as a whole that make them worthy of their tax exempt status.  On this thread it was pointed out that the COA at one university was about $8,000min 1979, adjustment for inflation that would be around $29,000 in today's dollars, but the COA now is actually $80,000.  During that time they have stockpiled endowments in the billions, in no significant part due to being able to grow the endowments tax free.  Why do we continue to provide tax exempt status so they can price gouge and amass huge endowments.  Those are reasonable questions to ask, despite the visceral reaction to dismiss those questions. [/quote]

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