^You assume a lot of things about what I must be thinking. I am mainly thinking if nonprofits are living up to the benefit they get through tax exemption as they get bigger and tax cost greater. Public univeristies do a lot of good, certainly a lot more good on very minimal publiuc funding. Compared to private U’s their enrollment is much greater benefitting wider population. Do Princeton grads contribute to the society 10 times more than Rutgers grads? Isn’t the funding a bit skewed? Aren’t we contributing to the inequality we often talk about? I don’t see a small tax on nonprofits is a big problem people seem to make it out to be. How much would Harvard suffer if they have to pay 5% tax on their $1.7B? How does that compare State Us budget cuts? I think we need to bolster public education in State Us as well as in K-12 whatever it takes. I’d like to see a strong middle class.
I’m not contributing anything to Princeton, although I wish I were! I live in NJ so I happily contribute to Rutgers which gets 21 percent of their’ $3.78 billion annual budget from state revenues.
http://budgetfacts.rutgers.edu/
About 85 Million? Check my math please.
I think most people agree with this. Where your logic is baffling to me is your assertion that a select few private college endowments should be taxed to achieve this, but no other action.
Good job finding the flaws. Now fix it. Go on, suggest a few other methods. I do contribute to Princeton and a few other well endowed private Us. It wouldn’t bother me if I don’t get to fully deduct my contributions if that means better public education.
Then my suggestion is you give the deductible portion of that contribution to whatever public institutions you like.
I must point out the obvious irony in your last post, which is that you contribute to Princeton while believing they should not have the benefit of all the money that is contributed to them. This makes me think that my guess in post #12, that you are pulling my leg, is true, so I am out.
@Iglooo - again, as nonprofits, all universities are required to spend substantially all of their revenues funding teaching, research and education generally. Harvard has a lot of money and spends a lot of money on this. On what basis do you assume that a dollar in Harvard’s pocket does less good there than at a state university? And, related to this, although I think it’s an unanswerable question whether Princeton grads contribute 10x more to society than Rutgers grads, it might be a good idea to look at quantifiable measures. I’ll pick one: by my count, 41 people affiliated with Princeton have won the Nobel Prize (https://www.princeton.edu/main/about/facts/nobel/). The equivalent number at Rutgers seems to be four (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rutgers_University_people). No knock on Rutgers, but maybe universities with large endowments like Princeton actually are uniquely positioned to do good things for society and shouldn’t be unfairly penalized and prevented from pursuing their missions to the best of their ability.
The logic of applying adverse incentives (punishing the colleges which do the best job of fundraising and then investing their endowments) in order to funnel money to the institutions that do a weaker job baffles me.
The citizenry of a state provides a heck of a lot more support to the public U’s than just the actual published subsidy from the state budget. States build underutilized airports so that students, faculty and administrators can get direct flights out. States build underutilized roads and other infrastructure items so they can locate campuses in rural areas (cheaper land costs) and the taxpayers end up on the hook. States often end up helping the local municipalities gerrymander their districts and change the property tax structure since the towns/cities that state college’s are located in need boosters (otherwise known as congressional representatives), strong public K-12 schools, etc.
I am all for enhancing the strength of the state U system. But penalizing Harvard is a naive way to do that. In my state, the citizens seem to love building fantastic sports facilities and nice dorms. So we have those. Building a nano-tech lab- not so much. Taking money from Harvard doesn’t get the citizens of another state interested in investing in science.
As usual, @blossom is right on - particularly in the last paragraph. Since we’re talking about Princeton vs. Rutgers, I would note that in 1997 Princeton tore down its football stadium, dating from 1914, and built a new one at a cost of $45 million. In 2008, by contrast, Rutgers spent $102 million renovating and expanding the football stadium they’d built in 1993 for $28 million. The expansion/renovation ended up having to be financed entirely with debt, some elements had to be postponed because of the cost, and Rutgers ended up selling the naming rights to the stadium to High Point Solutions.
So, in comparing priorities, consider that fabulously wealthy Princeton spent about one-third as much as Rutgers in generally the same time period to do the same thing, i.e., build a new football stadium. Both are, of course, institutions of higher learning, but clearly sports are very important to Rutgers, so important, in fact, that poor Rutgers spent $130 million on a football stadium. For context, Princeton’s annual financial aid budget is about $140 million.
So, do I have confidence that if we tax Princeton and give that money to Rutgers, Rutgers will make better use of it? No, I do not.
I first have to apologize to OP for hijaking the thread. The disparity of funding between private and public Unis has been on my mind for some time. This will be my last post here to return the thread to its original topic.
If State Unis are misusing funds, easy fix would be a national fund created for more proper distribution. The major tax advantage of private University endowments is at federal level anyway.
For-profit entities (business corporations) are taxed on the basis of their profits, the amount of revenue they earn in excess of their deductible expenses. They are not taxed on the basis of their overall revenue, or even on the portion of their revenue that might come from interest and dividends, but only on their overall profits, after deducting expenses.
On what basis should we tax “rich” (or not so rich) non-profit organizations? There is no profit to tax.
From a simple Revenue minus Expenses standpoint, Princeton’s and Harvard’s endowments and the Catholic and Mormon Churches earn a lot of money. I’m not a tax accountant and can’t tell you what the excess revenue is called, but if it walks like a duck…
Edit to add: I have no issue with Harvard, Princeton, or the referenced churches putting a portion of their earnings away every year and don’t want to get into a debate about tax exempt entities and public policy. It’s just that I find the notion that “there’s no profit to tax” absurd.
Endowments of non-profits earn capital gains and interest. Just like investments of individuals and corporations. Not making the claim it should be taxed just telling you what the revenue is.
I understand. I earn capital gains and interest too. Whether they’re reported on my partnership return or my personal return, they’re not called “profit” there either. They’re called capital gains and interest income and I pay tax on tis income. So technically, perhaps @colfac92 is correct, “there is no profit to tax”, but there is still income to not tax. Like @doschicos, I’m not arguing tax treatment, just pointing out that non-profits sometimes make money.
University endowments are portfolios of cash and securities, held in various accounts. They earn interest and dividend income, and rise or fall in value, just like anyone’s personal wealth. The “profits” generated from this are spent on education, though, and, when there’s enough left over, a portion is retained to build up the endowment so that more of those “profits” can be spent on education. There are no shareholders benefiting from those “profits”, sharing in the income and capital gains, just students and employees who further the mission of education, which is deemed to be a valid public purpose. This is why endowments aren’t taxed. There is no logical basis to argue that once an endowment reaches a certain size, it should be taxed - that’s equivalent to saying “you’re producing too much of a good thing (education), so now you’re going to be taxed on the income that you use to produce it”. Either education is a valid purpose for a non-taxed non-profit, or it isn’t.
And other things too, such as real estate.
Anyone still think we should be taxing Princeton to subsidize Rutgers? Here’s the update, an article from today’s New York Times, entitled “Chasing Big Sports Goals, Rutgers Stumbles Into a Vat of Red Ink”, on the money pit that is the Rutgers athletic department: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/12/sports/rutgers-university-athletic-department-deficits.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fsports&action=click&contentCollection=sports®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0
The whole article is damning, but here’s a relevant extract:
Meanwhile, according to the same article, at Rutgers “30 percent of the curriculum is taught by contract teachers, many of them paid like piecework seamstresses. And Rutgers’s tuition costs rank high nationally.”
When RU gets full pay from BIG deficit goes POOF. BTW many schools have similar athletic fees. UVA charges FAR more
http://www.c-ville.com/uvas-student-bank-undergrads-pay-13-2-million-athletics-fees/#.WMXfBG_yuUk
http://awfulannouncing.com/2016/big-ten-schools-will-see-media-revenues-skyrocket-thanks-new-tv-deal.html
Has it been a tough ride for RU–sure but they have a 90% chance of coming out in the black sooner than later. Bball is in good hands–football hard to say yet.
And most large Us have 30% or more adjuncts teaching these days. Yale is about 25%
http://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/yale-university/academic-life/faculty-composition/
@barrons - my point is that Rutgers’ priorities are, to put it mildly, very different from Princeton’s, and things have been grossly mismanaged at the former, with the athletic department hemorrhaging tens of millions of dollars (see my post #26, noting how Rutgers went into debt to build a football stadium costing about as much as Princeton spends on financial aid in a year). Another poster on this thread was arguing that universities with large endowments such as Princeton should be taxed to subsidize state universities such as Rutgers; apart from the fact that taxing one nonprofit to subsidize another makes no sense, the Rutgers athletic situation was a concrete example of why I think doing so would be a very bad idea.
By the way, if I’m reading it properly, it looks to me like the website you cited says that Rutgers (New Brunswick) has 66% adjuncts, so that may be the apples-to-apples comparison with Yale rather than the NYT article. If so, I think Rutgers might have been well-advised to forgo the new football stadium and the other big athletic expenditures.
I’d take a deep dive on those Yale numbers before assuming anything.
Yale’s law school is a big user of adjuncts- but these are not the “earning minimum wage patching together a living” adjuncts- these are famous lawyers and former judges who teach for the joy of it. Yale’s poli sci department and other institutes are big users of adjuncts (Tony Blair was a famous adjunct- I think there have been a few former heads of the foreign service, Secty of State, etc). School of Music- School of Architecture- more adjuncts.
But students flock to hear “famous people”. Not every adjunct is created equal. Tony Blair is not running around to four campuses every week teaching Intro to Poli Sci and working out of his car.
Agree that RU seems to have some misplaced priorities. But I don’t live or vote in NJ. However, the idea of penalizing Princeton and rewarding Rutgers is the classic example of a perverse incentive. Let’s take all the universities that mismanage money and reward them by penalizing the ones that are good at fundraising, good at managing their resources, AND spend money on things that pay off in terms of the educational experience.
Sounds like a winning plan.
Princeton recently built a dorm that costs multiples per room over most dorms at most colleges. Tax deduction for the donor. I don’t favor taking money away from PU BUT to project that they spend it wisely does not follow either.
51% non TT faculty. Not 66%
Info on Yale–many in “other” category which is harder to analyze.
https://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/w054_fac_u_rank.pdf
And RU-NB–looks more like about 30% non TT.
https://oirap.rutgers.edu/instchar/Factbook_PDFs/2015/6-LR-Facstf15.pdf