One wonders how much lower student debt would be if “nonprofit” schools limited the wages paid their staff and administration. I am not saying that the state should dictate what any private school pays, but there should be limits on salaries if one wants the tax free nonprofit status.
Our government should not be allowed to tell Harvard how much it should pay its president, but if Harvard wants to enjoy tax free status, there should be a limit of how much a nonprofit pays its executives – and staff.
Every dollar that Harvard does not pay because it is “nonprofit” is a dollar that comes from another citizen of the Commonwealth.
If we want to address the high cost of college and the problem of student debt, ignoring this part of the problem is evidence of who is in control of this mess, and who prefers to look the other way.
…and then we can move on to the cost of textbooks whose copyright protections make a bundle for the few but cost our students billions of dollars a year. Public funding of textbooks would save us billions and lower student debt.
A little bit of Googling revealed a summary of Ivy League executive compensation (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-29/ivy-league-presidents-take-pay-cuts-up-to-25-in-covid-crunch). According to that piece, Larry Bacow (President of Harvard) was paid an annual rate of $1.2M in 2018 and took a 25% pay cut in 2020 (emphasis mine):
Executive compensation is not a major driver for spiraling costs of attendance. Some more important drivers are:
Runaway student debt is a huge issue, and the exploding cost of higher education is a huge issue. Attacking executive compensation of colleges and universities is a distraction that only exacerbates these problems by ignoring the real drivers.
A better approach is outlined by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — tax the ultrawealthy, and use a small portion of the resulting new tax revenue to make higher education a right of every American. Our public education system should include all education, rather than just K-12.
This thread-starter reminds me of the tired practice of attacking executive and middle-management compensation at the T — a favorite of the right-wing anti-tax crowd that only makes an already-bad situation worse. The T needs adequate public funding, and that needs increased tax revenue. The problems at the T are caused by imposing the Big Dig debt burden on the T while refusing to fund vital capital needs for decades.
The strategy of attacking executive compensation and middle management at the T while doing nothing to address the real problems will result in destroying public transportation in MA. The strategy of attacking executive compensation at colleges and universities while doing nothing to address the real problems will result in destroying higher education.
We should reduce student debt by making quality higher education more available — not by destroying it.
How does denying tax exempt status to organizations that can afford to pay multimillion dollar compensation packages to their executives destroy quality education?
This piece is just another of your screeds attacking higher education.
Does denying tax-exempt status raise or lower the cost side of the ledger of the school in question? If the costs of a school go up, will that increase or decrease the student debt of those who attend?
Is forcing a school to choose from a lower-compensated pool more likely to help or hurt the quality of the resulting executive leadership? When the Patriots replaced the expensive Tom Brady with the less expensive Cam Newton (because of the NFL salary cap) did that move improve or degrade the quality of the team?
Your comment isn’t about reducing student debt, because your proposed cap would have little or no impact on the cost to each student.
Your comment is instead about punishing schools that, in your view, pay too much to their executives.
As a Cambridge native forever priced out of my home town on a public teachers salary, it would be nice if the main agents of gentrification and property hoarding in Cambridge were forced to pay their fair share of local and state taxes. I liked Andrew Yangs idea of taxing endowments better since it will discourage wealth hoarding on the part of universities and encourage wealthy donors to give to needier charities.
Harvard should help fix the transit and affordability crisis in Cambridge, or at least help bail out the scores of local businesses that are closing due to lack of clientele. The Square long ago became a character free mall, with very few of the establishments catering to wealthy students and faculty particularly better than the local places they replaced.
I’m glad someone finally threatened my Alma maters public health funding in order to force them to reopen the level 1 trauma center they capriciously closed in the late 90’s. Scores of South Side residents, particularly poor black people, died since they had to commute to north side hospitals.
I see both sides of it. Without Harvard or MIT, Boston could have gone the way of Detroit after industrialization. The education hospital complex kept Pittsburgh from being a true Rust Belt city. Like a one factory town that loses its factory, a lot of smaller college towns are in danger if the local public or private college closes. I’m thinking of Charleston, IL where my sister in law attended Eastern Illinois University. That states fiscal crisis is possibly an existential threat to its long term survival.
The irony of Covid and remote learning is that gap between the Have Mores and the Have Nots in higher Ed will only get worse. I’m with Tom that a public option for higher ed and post secondary technical training is essential to closing the income gap in the future. Every kid should have access to the best paying jobs and opportunities, in every part of the country. Taxing big endowments and the patently for profit parts of higher Ed could help with that.
Sure. The same is true of Tufts in Somerville and Medford, and BU in Brookline.
That is a different discussion, though. I don’t hear you making any attempt to tie this to executive compensation. More importantly, while this may be a vital and necessary step in addressing various issues in the host city or town, I hope you agree that this will worsen rather than improve the student debt crisis.
If the goal is reducing student debt burden, then increasing the costs of each college or university hurts rather than helps.
I don’t see how taxing big endowments increases access to the best paying jobs and opportunities.
I’m not sure that any of the “patently for profit parts of higher Ed” are that profitable, unless you’re talking about the sleazy ripoff operations like the failed and fraudulent Trump University — those aren’t a significant contributor to the larger student debt problem.
Runaway student debt is being driven by runaway college and university costs combined with declining enrollments. We need to find ways to lower, rather than raise, college and university costs.
Increased government grants, loans, and tax breaks for students is one aspect. Expanding public education is another. Dramatically increasing research grants and funding is a third — especially if those funds were explicitly tied to dollar-for-dollar decreases in student costs. Increasing tax credits for corporate research grants is yet another.
Certainly for-profit banks should not be allowed to apply predatory interest rates and fees to student loans, especially for borrowers who are clearly unable to repay those loans. My oldest children are still paying off “TERI” loans — high-interest loans that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. That’s obscene.
There have been conflicts between schools and the cities and towns that host them for as long as there have been schools. The explosion in student debt is not driven by town-gown conflicts and it’s not going to be affected by raising the effective property tax rate applied to college campuses.
These are all fair points but to put them in context check out Joe Biden’s recent town hall. In reply to a question about student debt, he went into a rant against Ivy League graduates who would benefit (supposedly) from any increase beyond the proposed $10,000 limit.
That is just Biden bullshit. If the President has an issue with Ivy League schools, he should tax their bloated endowments instead of taking it out on recent graduates.
John is a lot more on point than the White House.
It’s all part of the same problem. If you can’ “hear it”, I guess I will have to say it louder. I did write
If the university (or foundation of private charity) cannot attract good people for this price, perhaps it does not deserve taxpayer support.
I am not attacking education, or Harvard. I am attacking the economic system where now, instead of a 20:1 ratio of CEO pay to average workers that we had in the 1960’s, we have a ratio of 350:1, a system where “nonprofit” status has taxpayers subsidizing universities and charitable foundations that pay their executives millions of dollars in compensation.
This battle needs to be fought on all fronts, including higher education.
I was responding to the comment by jconway. In his noble effort to be fair, he ignored a central fallacy of your argument — the utter absence of any actual connection between executive compensation and student debt.
You ARE, in fact, attacking both education and Harvard. You most certainly are NOT attacking the very real student debt crisis.
This attempted conclusion only confirms that you are indeed attacking both education and Harvard.
There is an “utter absence of any actual connection. . . ” but that lack of connection is between executive compensation and the quality of the education provided.
Agreed.
Why is there a “Student Debt Crisis”?
Simply taking tax dollars to wipe the debt without addressing both of these causes will make this a permanent problem. Certainly multimillion dollar university president salaries are not the one and only cause of the high cost of a college degree and certainly multimillion dollar CEO compensations are not the only cause of low wages, but both are heads of the same Hydra that is at the heart of it all. I am not attacking Harvard, or Walmart, or Michael Neidorff, or Dick DeVos, but I am attacking the system that they support, either out front politically or with their complicity.
If colleges were really competing for fewer students that would drive tuition down, not up. The cost of facilities should also be going down since there because of virtual classes, there should be fewer lecture halls needed.
The high priced executives in higher education seemed to be skilled in providing less and charging more. Cheaper executives with different skill sets might not be a bad thing.
I went to a community college for my first two years. In today’s dollars, it cost me $3,750 a semester. As I took a year off after high school to make money for school, I made $45,000 at an entry level job at a major local employer, enough to buy a new car and pay for my first two years of school.
Side note: Many of the professors I had at the community college taught at local universities. One professor laughed that his salary was the same at the community college as it was at the “Big Name” university, he used the same textbooks, same lectures, but the students at the community college paid a fraction of what the others did. Gee, if he’s getting the same pay and I’m getting the same education, where is all that extra money going?
I went to a private university to get my four year diploma but had to take a loan out. Again, in today’s dollars, my loan payment was $250 a month for eight years. I paid it off in six years.
There was no need to forgive my loan because the system worked. If we are to cancel student debt but not address all the causes of this debt, we are, as my Australian friend would say, just wiping our ass with a hoop.
I don’t know how many colleges are looking to go virtual as a permanent method. I have heard that attracting students often involves promising state-of-the-art facilities (whether academic, athletic, residential, social, etc.), which certainly makes the experience more expensive.
Sorry Christopher, that’s just backward. You don’t raise prices in order to compete for customers. Any rational enterprise will try to reduce the cost of your product/service.
Maybe it is. I’m just repeating what I have read, though I would say that it’s not deliberately raising prices just cuz so much as enhancing quality in a way that increases the price. Then again, there are items I can think of for which expense enhances the appeal.
In general, it is the manager(s) of the endowments that pull in the big bucks, not the college presidents. Although there has been a lot of increase for college president wages over the past decade or two. Even 570K was extreme at one point in time.
Also, that math shown doesn’t make sense. 75% of 1.2 million is more like 900K. Why bring up 570K is for 6 months work in 2018, exactly? It’s irrelevant, and his current pay at 900K hardly deserves to be viewed as ‘reasonable.’
The fact is that everywhere you look, prices are out of whack. It is easy to say ‘this is okay’ or ‘this is bad,’ depending on any particular inclination.
“They should pay taxes” doesn’t really hold water, imo, but asking why they are allowed to hold an endowment I think is valid. We need less taxes, less forms of taxes, etc. The last thing we need to do is expand all the stupid overhead dedicated to taxes.
What gets taught in the classroom (half of which are lies) is nothing compared to the leadership by example which is higher education. Many schools were founded to make a better society by creating Christians to spread the Word and science so we could both conquer nature and our depraved inner nature. Hoarding has never been a biblical principle, so why are schools hoarding?
Much like Luthor attacking the church for selling the redemption of sins, most non-profits are now in the same game. Many of the endowments are in the form of stocks which can’t be sold. The alumni who created public corporations give them to protect their stocks value, and get a tax deduction for their donation. They were taught to hoard first, and purchase redemption in the form of funding a chair, purchasing a building, and my favorite, building a trading room to train the next generation of the Devil’s disciples. What more proof do you need that stocks are real than the widespread behavior of higher education’s administration?
Everything else in our society is a derivative of Wall Street, whether it is the cost of textbooks, housing, teacher pay, insurance, etc. Rather than serving as a fountain of enlightenment, universities are the source of the biggest lies. And let’s not forget that besides the Catholic Church, they are the oldest institutions on the planet, predating all governments.
We should forgive student debts, liquidate the endowments (not an easy thing), and begin to begin again. The future always depends on letting go of the past.
I quoted an excerpt from a linked reference. Had you read that reference, you would have learned that Mr. Bacow’s compensation was reported for six months of 2018 because he started in the middle of 2018 and 2018 was the latest year data was available at the time the piece was written. The relevance is that Harvard was mentioned in the thread-starter. We apparently disagree about “deserves to be viewed as reasonable”. Mr. Bacow’s compensation is at or near the bottom of the cited list.
It appears that ANY Ivy League compensation is unreasonable by your standards. This is not surprising since you apparently view any data as “irrelevant” — heaven forbid any actual facts get in the way of your flame.
I see. So you propose to literally destroy ALL higher education in America so that America can “begin to begin again”. Apparently we should ignore the reality that higher education in America is still the envy of the world.
I am surprised that jconway upvoted this kind of anti-intellectual nihilism. With “progressive” commentary like this entire diary, who needs Trumpists or Republicans?
Yes indeed, let’s tear down the entire frigging economy. All the universities. All the corporations. The entire financial system. All of Wall Street.
If you think that’s going to do anything but destroy whatever is left of the American dream, then I have both a bridge in Brooklyn and also several truckloads of red baseball caps that I’ll let you have for an amazingly low price.
Jeesh.
Jeesh? lol Ok, I was going to actually delete that part about the income because you quoted it, and didn’t write it, but yea, 900K is too much.
Then you conveniently ignore all the other points. I didn’t say anything about destroying higher ed; it has already lost its way on its own. It is no longer about defeating nature or our inner nature.
America is the envy of the world? I think a lot of the world is scratching its head about the gap between who we think we are and who we actually are.
But really, you think I am ‘anti-intellectual’ because I say things that you disagree with or ignore? I am anti-hypocrisy. Putting kids into debt is antithetical to educating them. “Two wolves and a lamb deciding on what to have for lunch.” How is it that a 17 year old can’t vote, smoke or drink, but it’s ok for them to sign a promissory note by those allegedly looking out for what is best for them and society. This is a pretty corrupt version of statesmanship, imo.
Of course, no one school deserves all the blame. The Ivy league kids graduate with the least amount of debt, so Harvard etc is hardly seems to be the direct source of the problem, but their privileged status defines the culture that we all followed.
You seem to be most concerned with defending Wall Street however. You do realize that there are about 2800 companies on Wall Street, and about 1500 schools. The businesses and the schools can go on without their ties to Wall Street. Nothing stops them from providing their goods or services if Wall Street ceases to exist. If a business needs capital, they can still borrow it from banks…like every other business.
I could go on, but I’ll stop here. If you really care about the American Dream, if you want people to be able to afford to live in the town they grew up in, to have that simple middle class existence of a job, home, security, etc., then the lambs can’t coexist with wolves, or act like wolves as the necessity of survival to pay off their loans.There is no ‘wealth of nations’ is everyone is in debt for 40+ years.
The Deserted Village by Oliver Goldsmith – Once a part of the standard curriculum at Harvard, and source of the name for Mt Auburn Cemetery, and Auburn everywhere.
Whatever you feel about Mr. Bacow’s compensation, it is among the lowest of the Ivy League presidents cited in the piece.
The fact that you assert a particular number does not make it so. So far, your own personal opinion is the only standard you’ve offered. Please forgive me for rejecting your arrogance in doing so.
Please stop misquoting me. I wrote (emphasis here):
I stand by that statement, and you stood it on its ear in your response.
It is not ok, it should never have been ok, and I’ve never asserted otherwise. I have enthusiastically supported forgiving ALL student debt for years. Again, please stop misrepresenting my views.
I’m not “most concerned” with defending Wall Street. Wall Street (and its counterparts elsewhere in both geography and time) exists in order to connect those who wish to invest in businesses with those business who desire that investment. That market will exist whether or not you destroy Wall Street. You have offered no information about the mechanism that you propose as an alternative to Wall Street.
America already learned, in the run-up to the Great Depression, that strict government oversight of Wall Street — along with banks — is an absolute requirement of any government seeking to protect its citizenry. You’ve offered nothing about your proposed replacement.
Again, you’re arguing against a straw-man. I enthusiastically agree with you that eliminating student debt is a central part of recovering from our current societal dysfunction.
You, like the author of the thread-starter, provide NO information showing how imposing arbitrary limits on executive compensation or increasing property tax obligations in any way reduces student debt burden. Perhaps that is because pretty much any rational analysis comes to the opposite conclusion.
Your prescription is worse than the disease it purports to cure.
Tom, you have me confused. You say I am wrong about everything, then say you agree, and that I am only wrong about executive compensation. And, sorta, that Wall Street is okay, even though it is bad. My critique would be the end of western civilization, and we can regulate Wall Street, but not the university president’s wages. How is it that we are able to do one but not the other? And again, what about reforming the behavior of the universities (investing and hoarding for starters) and their both practical and educational foundation of teaching the virtue of an unregulated Wall Street?
To clarify, I said taxing the universities is not a good solution, and I also pointed out that the president is not the highest paid on campus. The endowment managers can easily make double or triple their pay.
Generally, the more the employee makes the more the boss makes. I was at Tufts when they hired a consultant to review salaries. Because Internal Audit had jurisdiction over everyone, he was high up on the totem pole and as a result got a big raise, even though the department only had 3 people. What I wonder now is, whose idea was it to conduct the review, and who selected the consultant? It may have been the plan all along or it may have been a kickback, or just a coincidence. I saw the same thing when our town manager had a review. Suddenly everybody gets a slightly modified title, a massage of the reporting cascade, and everyone gets a big raise. The board of directors for corporations do the same things. Hire somebody, give them oodles of money, and everybody on the board’s income goes up similarly. Welcome aboard! Nest feathering has been around a long time. Hire a consultant or form a committee to give you the answer you want. Intellectual honesty be damned.
So now we have 17 year olds signing themselves into debt to support this farce. Who’s next? Are we going to have middle school kids go into debt, or are we going to return to child labor and indentured servitude? But sure, let’s withhold any criticism of the universities and those who run them. The ends justify the means.
Also for the record, I know it is a hard job and one must balance a lot of conflicting voices, needs, wants and egos. But isn’t this exactly the problem of our society? No one person is responsible for everything, therefore nobody is responsible for anything. It’s the kids fault for signing the paper.
One wonders how many 17 year old kids would want to saddle themselves with debt and go college if they could get a decent paying job with a high school diploma.
Somehow we’ve denigrated so many jobs as “unskilled” even though as we just learned, they are all “essential” jobs.
Why do we assume that everyone wants to go to college, or should want to “better themselves”?
Imagine how much more money a job requiring a college degree would pay if an ordinary but essential job that did not require a college degree paid wage that could support a family?
No, we can’t simply raise the minimum wage to $25 an hour, what it would be if that wage kept pace with productivity output as it did up until 1968. The economy could not handle that hit. But we could raise the minimum to $25, slowly, if we, at the same time, started to lower the wages at the top. No, not “communism” or “socialism”….just the world as it was in 1968 when the CEO/average worker ratio was 20:1.
Do that and voila, the student “debt crisis” is a distant memory.
I agree. All you really have to do is require the wage spread in a business to be no more than 5:1 or something similar. (Pirates were 2:1 or 1.5:1) We don’t need government to redistribute wealth, we just need owners and managers to be responsible to society.
And, we need to put an end to the stock market, which is driving a large share of the volatility. Control interest rates, or better yet eliminate them, and we will have a stable and prosperous society with much fewer conflicts and problems. Sure, we will have to give up free checking. Not a huge sacrifice. Prices need to be relative to costs, and businesses price according to a reasonable formula. You know when you see something sold at 50% off that the mark-up was obscene to start. Lower rents and real estate values so overhead isn’t a burden for citizens or businesses, and people can live easily on a reasonable stable income. Every renaissance has the same root: Low prices and low inflation and less hoarding.
The problem is that businesses trust other businesses even less than the government. All they think is ‘competition.’
Even 100:1 would be a good start.
$900,0000.00 to $35,000.00 is like 25:1. So 100;1 would leave people making $4 million year to $17 hr.
You would think that would be reasonable but the president only makes 400k, so going under 25:1 should be reasonable too. The athletes could makes less like they did 25 years ago before everything blew up.
The more expensive everything is the poorer we become.
Like I said it’s a good start when you consider there are companies where it’s even more out of whack than that.
True that. One doesn’t become a billionaire with a sense of proportionality.
I don’t think so. The ultrawealthy literally do not care about wages. The very fact that the ratio of highest to lowest compensation has exploded in the last few decades itself shows that the two are not constrained by each other.
Instead, the ultrawealthy are sucking so much wealth out of the (consumer) economy that nobody except the ultra-wealthy can afford to spend money on things.
Small business owners can’t pay $25/hour because small business don’t bring in enough revenue to pay those wages. They don’t bring in that revenue because their customers have no money to spend.
The economy generates ENORMOUS amounts of new wealth every quarter. The problem is NOT that there isn’t enough wealth in America, the problem is that virtually all of it is hoarded by the handful of ultrawealthy at the very top of VERY concentrated wealth distribution.
Wages and income are essentially noise-level components of that.
If the new wealth being generated by the ultra-wealthy were distributed to the rest of us — as a UBI or even as a personal equity portfolio that every American had full access to (including shareholder voting rights), then Americans wouldn’t need $25/hr to survive.
Income is different from wealth. The ultrawealthy don’t care about income, because it is an arbitrary number that is readily manipulated by any financial manager who knows what they’re doing.
We need to more fairly distribute the wealth being generated at the very top of the wealth distribution.
THAT is a more effective way to make the student debt crisis a distant memory.
Taxing huge amounts of wealth, to me, is akin to increasing the amount of insecticides we spray in the kitchen to deal with an infestation of cockroaches and not taking measures to keep the kitchen clean. It treats the symptoms, yes but does nothing to reduce the cause.
Yes, because their customers have so little money with their sub-$25 /hour jobs.
Henry Ford made his fortune by building cars that his workers could buy.
Agreed. I’ve written at length about various steps the government can and should take to address the cause. I think we agree on nearly all of those.
Absolutely, that is the point I was making. No labor-based method of distributing newly-generated wealth will change that. That’s because the overwhelming majority of newly-created wealth comes from sources that do not require labor.
Henry Ford couldn’t make his cars without the labor of his workers. Jeff Bezos is generally credited with being the wealthiest person in the world today. He doesn’t need his workers to continue to gain wealth.
If the owner of an industrial robot also owns or licenses the intellectual property (the copyright, trademark, patents, and so on) that programs that robot — a requirement of essentially every company that uses robotics — then that owner receives wealth from the use of that robot. The payroll component of the cost side of that company is not a major factor in the net wealth generated by the enterprise — by design.
It is not possible to solve the wealth concentration problem by manipulating minimum wage and payroll legislation. It will not be solved by any income tax, no matter how progressive.
It can only be solved by regulation of the acquisition and distribution (or lack thereof) of wealth — specifically, equity (shares of corporate ownership), annual taxes on net worth (as per the proposals from Ms. Warren) and generation transfer taxes (gift and estate tax).
I’m not surprised. You seem to be so busy writing that you aren’t reading. I offered you the exact lines in your comment where I think you ran off the rails. Could it be that ANY attempt to disagree with you is so baffling that you are unable to comprehend it?
It seems clear that you feel that university presidents in general and Mr. Bacow in particular make too much money. Fine. Let’s stipulate that for the sake of discussion.
That observation, if true, does absolutely nothing to reduce student debt burden. This thread is ostensibly about reducing student debt burden, at least according to its title. You can make Mr. Bacow work for nothing and it still won’t change the student debt burden of anybody. Not now, not ever.
Another strawman. Nobody is suggesting that anybody “withhold any criticism of the universities and those who run them”, certainly not me or anyone else on this thread.
One more time — we MUST eliminate the student burden. Two of my five children have been burdened with absurdly high debt for their entire lives (they are each in their thirties). We should NOT allow 17 year olds to make these commitments. We should write off existing loans.
Our colleges and universities face a financial crisis. The current approach is unsustainable. The exploding student debt that we are imposing on our young people is one immediate and acute symptom.
That problem is not caused by excessive compensation paid to university executives and won’t be solved by setting arbitrary limits on it. That problem is not caused by host cities and towns getting too little property tax revenue from campuses within them, and will not be solved by forcing increases in property taxes. I understand that you don’t propose that — the author of the thread-starter DID.
If we are serious about reducing student debt, then we should focus our attention on those factors that drive student debt.
I agree we seem to agree but seem to be arguing anyway. Like I said, the president isn’t the problem but the actions of the investors managing a hoard that shouldn’t exist in a way that shouldn’t be available.
I’ll try to clarify my thoughts. The issue isn’t ONLY student debt but ALL debt. We should forgive student debt because it is immoral from the get go. Teaching the next generation is our responsibility, not a source for our retirement funds. Talk about the sins of the fathers. But, if we can forgive this debt, then maybe we can start working on all the other forms of debt (mortgages, healthcare, business, automobile, etc).
So what is the source of all debt? In general it was the decisions of 1720 and the adoption of paper money. Of course, debt existed before that. Paper money just gave the problem room to expand more rapidly. Co-created with paper money was the stock market.
I realize that the pay of a college president isn’t going to solve a trillion dollar problem, but given his position, I think his/her example says a lot! We talk about pay gaps between workers and CEO’s, but what about the gap between the investment manager and the negative income of the students? It’s the same paradigm so deserves the same condemnation. You are taking a position based on political strategy of passing debt forgiveness, whereas I am making a moral critique. Of course I would agree that “a compromise” that made the president a fall guy and the left all the debt standing wouldn’t be progress.
We could channel some of that endowment money into early education. I think that’s a more reasonable source of funds than what Joe Biden is proposing, ie. that we saddle college graduates with debt. Check out Biden’s comments on student debt at his recent town meeting.
I am as strongly against the end of all civilization as any Ivy Leaguer, but I don’t think the choice is between living in caves and protecting Harvard’s endowment. That’s a little melodramatic.
I agree that we should be investing MUCH more in early education. I think we should also be investing much more in ensuring that every American family has access to the basic needs of humanity — food, shelter, warmth, and medical care — as well as education.
I think that taxing the wealth of the ultrawealthy is the best source of funding needed for that. I think increasing that increasing the costs of private colleges and universities — including endowments like the Harvard endowment — will increase, rather than decrease, student debt burden. I don’t see how any school or university will lower its price to attendees in response to an increase in its costs.
I read Mr. Biden’s comments as a desire to see the elimination of student debt come from the Congress rather than from the White House. It sounds as though we both agree that existing student debt should be eliminated.
I don’t know about “living in caves”. I think the impact of simultaneously dismantling Wall Street, the banking and finance industry, and private education will have a devastating impact on most Americans. That was tried in 18th century France, Russia in the early 20th century, and China in the mid 20th century.
I don’t wish to emulate any of those prior examples.
“At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League – Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown – more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent.”(NYT 1/18/2017)
If that’s the best we can get with these overpaid executives and bloated endowments, we should stop propping them up with tax subsides. We can still have a civilization without this racket.
“At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League . . . more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent. “(NYT 1/18/17)
If this is the best that overpaid executives can do with bloated endowments, why should the taxpayers continue to prop them up. Civilization can survive without this racket.