By Marc Jampole
A Wall Street Journal article is reimagining university finances as a wealth transfer program that
steals from the rich and middle class to give to the poor. In doing so, writer
Douglas Belkin attempts to reframe the current class war in the United States.
Belkin’s argument starts with the fact that government has
withdrawn massive subsidies from public universities in recent years. Belkin
does not mention that this cutback resulted from an historic lowering of taxes
on the wealthy. The way that public
universities made up the shortfall from reduced government subsidies was to
raise tuition. But, as many American families understand with painful clarity,
that pushed tuition out of reach of many deserving students. Universities have
responded by giving tuition breaks to more and more working class and poor
students.
The article quotes from both poor students who say they
wouldn’t be able to attend college without the tuition breaks and from students
whose families make amounts that are just out of reach for qualifying for
needs-based aid. One student bemoans the irony of her tuition payments
subsidizing poorer students while she will graduate with educational loans to
pay. The article seems to postulate that the sole reason for tuition increases
has been to make sure middle class and rich students pay enough to carry their
poorer cohorts.
Following the money is often helpful in understanding a
situation, but in this case, the Journal
has only followed half the money trail, the half after tax cuts have gutted
state and federal budgets. When we follow the complete unvirtuous cycle that
has radically changed the nature of college finances over the past 30 years we
see that the real transfer of wealth has not been down the ladder but up the
ladder. Rich folk pay less in taxes, and the middle class and poor pay more in
tuition. When we consider that rich folk represent a higher percentage of
private school students, which enjoy no or limited government support, the
redistribution of wealth upwards intensifies. Moreover, it is naïve to think
that most poor state school students get enough of a tuition break to make up
for the obscene inflation in college costs over recent decades.
Behind the Journal’s partial and partisan math
looms the politics of selfishness, the benighted idea that it always unfair to
make a citizen pay for another citizen.
The ideology of selfishness informs and shapes the entire article. It
describes the efforts of students in Texas and protestors in other states to
fight what the article calls “set-asides,” funds earmarked from tuition to pay
for tuition discounts for needy students.
The article quotes Ronald Ehrenberg, director of the
Cornell Higher Education Research Institute; “We used to believe that public higher education benefited all residents
of a state, not only the people who were attending, because the more highly
educated workforce meant more economic growth…But now our society has moved
toward the notion that the people who are paying are the ones who will benefit,
so they should pay.”
The idea that
society does not benefit from an educated workforce is complete nonsense and a
dangerous notion. More dangerous, though, is the underlying idea that group
solutions to public challenges are inherently unfair. The typical family will
need public college for 4-12 years, depending on how many children they have.
Most people couldn’t possible afford to pay for a high quality education over
that amount of time. Fortunately, most people remain in the work force for
40-45 years, giving them extra time to pay their fair share in taxes. Cutting
taxes and making people pay for their or their children’s college education
over a much shorter time will naturally lead to financial problems. The Journal
wants us to blame those problems on the poor, when it fact they have emerged
primarily because the wealthy have decided to retreat from the social contract which
ruled this country from the end of the Great Depression to the mid 1970s.
Conservatives like
to blame the poor and like even more to pretend that the best interests of the
middle class are different from those of the poor and working class. They want to pit the poor against the middle
class, so neither will realize who is perpetrating the real class war. But the
college financial crisis has as its root cause the same dynamic that has led to
our sluggish job recovery, the increased inequality of wealth, our public
school challenges and our decaying infrastructure of mass transit, bridges and
roads: Taxes are too low, especially on the wealthy, and have been for many
years now. As a nation, we have replaced the social contract that created a
middle class nation with a dog-eat-dog, I’m-only-in-it-for-myself ideology that
helps the rich take more.
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