Jeesh, you guys are overreacting. There is no need to take my post 128 so seriously. I’ll repeat what I said before in that post …
It was cheap demagoguery.
The only difference is that I was honest enough to identify it was such, unlike several other posts in this thread.
I deliberately left a couple logical flaws in my analysis in post 128 (working in the same spirit as that of the Nexus report that another poster linked to upthread). However, what you highlight is actually not one of them. I think you will realize this if you give it some thought.
You are absolutely right that this is one of the real problems. And although I do have some thoughts on the matter, I really doubt I am qualified to solve it.
I believe you are right about the occasional language class students not impacting the graduation rate, so the poster above who referenced their wife’s experience does not appear to be correct. (I’m assuming these occasional students aren’t receiving Pell grants even if they don’t have a bachelors degree).
However, kids who transfer to a 4-year college before completing their AA do impact the graduation rate; so the truth is probably higher than 20%.
If you look at my post **114/b, you’ll see that I mention that 30-35% is possibly a better number - I guess I’m such a pure, honest soul that even when I’m attempting cheap demagoguery I still try not to mislead too badly
The 30-35% graduation rate is the figure that public CC presidents advocate for. They clearly have every incentive to try to make this figure as high as possible, so 35% is probably an upper bound (the 65% figure that someone gave above is flawed). I suppose the truth is somewhere between 20% and 35%. Surprisingly, it appears that nobody is collecting this data.
I really have no interest in community college bashing (although University of Phoenix is fair game !). They are an important part of our post-secondary education system. Maybe I should have named my fictitious institution “Crappy 4-Year College” - emphasis on the “crappy”.
This has got to be the only place I've seen lower income people argue for more welfare for billionaires.
No. This lower income person is advocating that the Pell Grant not be taken away from lower income students who want to use it for Harvard or wherever. Harvard, or other privates, might replace it with more grants, or they might simply change their financial aid packages to include the Stafford loan for even the lowest income students.
@ucbalumnus your thread which you linked was great. Your comparisons between USC, UCLA and Yale demonstrated what I was talking about. If you go further down, as far as selectivity, the list of colleges which “meet 100% of need” and run the NPCs on those, you’ll find even more disparity. For some of the lowest income students the gap is too large to even consider.
As you said, the NPCs must be run even for, or especially for, the “meets full need” schools.
…but I think we are saying the same thing. They impact the graduation rate negatively by their absence from it when they transfer and graduate from a different school.
Tennesse experiment (?) with free community college enrolls 2x as many as they were expecting. It will be interesting to follow this cohort, and the Oregon program which is starting up soon.
Note, Northeast State – albeit one anecdote – has a 59% retention rate from year 1 to year 2, and that was before the free tuition/fees.
Seems like a good study, and there are plenty of controls.
A 2-year degree is probably all that many jobs require and it does include college level writing classes and spending two years in academic professional requirement. I think the private schools will adapt or will offer 2 year degrees (their grads can always come back and get a 4 year degree, but they leave with a useful piece of paper). If they can’t offer students more than a CC college, and don’t have a good graduation rate, they really need to come up with a way to be more useful and efficient …
Funny about kids not meeting the low requirements for paper work and community service. Well, first lesson about the adult real world, you got to do what you got to do.
What does a program like this cost ?
The only provision I don’t really like is the full-time requirement. I think there are lots of folks who just need to work to survive and should be allowed to educate themselves at minimal cost. Maybe they can get enough aid through other means, but I also question whether full-time college enrollment is the best strategy for continued enrollment.
What’s interesting is many of these people are also simultaneously the biggest proponents of “equality”, believing that we should tax the rich to subsidize the poor. Paul Krugman, Princeton economics professor, is a prime example of this contradiction. He has written numerous articles in the NYT on equality and assailing the “1%”. Meanwhile, Princeton is the richest school on the planet on an endowment per student basis. No problem with him there. The hypocrisy of the liberal left never ceases to amaze me.
There is nothing altruistic about these supposed “generous” donations. The purpose of such giving is entirely self-serving, does not benefit the public at large whatsoever but only benefit a tiny elite including first and foremost the donor himself. These alumni know that their donations will easily enable their children to enroll in these institutions. In addition, since “prestige” is closely associated with the size of an institution’s endowment, these outsized donations will only enhance the prestige of these institutions thereby enhancing the prestige of their own degree, and down the road, their children’s degree. Quid pro quo.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen have both donated tens of millions to the University of Washington and Washington State University, even though neither went to the UW or have children going there(Paul Allen went to WSU). That’s the kind of giving that is truly selfless and generous.
As the Nexus report pointed out, private universities are already receiving far too much public money in the form of tax subsidies and research grants. All donations of over $1M to private universities with over $10B in endowment should simply be taxed as income from this point forward. Since these schools often claim that they could accept a full 2 to 3 classes from the rejected applicants and they’d still be just as qualified, the taxes collected should be used to provide the same level of financial aid to all those rejected whose SAT test scores are above the 50th percentile at these schools, to attend schools of their choice (where they are accepted).
taxed as income to whom? The donor? I’d love to see your argument that donating to a wealthy university is meaningfully different from donating to a wealthy mega-church which supports a pastor with a 7 figure income (especially one with a large media presence), donating to a wealthy museum, etc.
Taxes as income to the university? Do you even understand the tax code??? Are you suggesting that taxes are owed on endowment returns greater than some number- in which case, you’d like to offer a perverse incentive to the endowment managers to be LESS EFFICIENT in how they invest their capital by getting crappy returns so they don’t pay taxes?
Trying to follow your argument. I get that you object to universities having non-profit status. What you are prepared to do about it, and how that makes any sense is tough to follow.
Why not tax every successful non-profit on the grounds that they clearly don’t need a public subsidy since they are successful? And thereby make sure that only marginally successful, financially insecure, poorly managed organizations get tax exempt status?
And then folks like me get to ask "why should be provide subsidies to poorly managed organizations? Why shouldn’t all non-profits strive to be like the Metropolitan Museum or the Red Cross or Harvard, i.e. financially stable, solid cash flow, prudent use of their endowment, aggressive development of ancillary revenue and market-level pricing?
If Harvard’s tuition were problematic, you wouldn’t have lines of applicants out the door. Thus the market speaks.
There’s some question whether Harvard should be classified as a university or as a hedge fund at this point. Some have described Harvard as “a large hedge fund that maintains a small educational institution on the side, for the tax preferences.”
Next time someone you loves gets life-saving treatment which was developed by a doctor at Harvard Medical School you may need to apologize to all the genuine hedge funds out there.
@blossom - This is a bit of a digression but I think it’s still relevant. I’m on a number of non-profit boards. In addition, I advise a number of non-profits on their investment portfolios on a pro bono basis.
A lot of people might be surprised. It’s not just Harvard that’s invested in hedge funds and the like. Even non-profits with relatively small endowments (say < $25 million) have investments in hedge funds. They may be jealous of Harvard’s success (actually Harvard isn’t as good as some of its peers), but jealous or not almost all of them are trying to copy how Harvard and its peers invest.
Their real problem is that they almost all have stink at it. One of my biggest challenges is trying to get them to know what they don’t know - it doesn’t help that a lot of consultants are giving them bad advice. Unfortunately, many of them feel that this is calling into question their investment acumen and intelligence - “we’re just as smart as the guys at Harvard.” Well, as they say, “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.”
I’m on boards too. And on an investment committee. The idea that a 25 million dollar endowment can invest in timber and P/E like David Swenson and his ilk is why folks like me (who are not professional portfolio people) get appointed to non-profit boards… precisely so we can point out the absurdity of what the professional guns for hire are recommending (some of the time).
I’m not surprised by this- I’m pointing out to the gang on CC which thinks a system of adverse incentives (i.e punish the successful non-profits by taxing their endowments thereby creating a drive to lower the returns to just below the taxable limit) is absurd. I don’t think society gets better or healthier by pushing people to underperform whether in investing an endowment, slacking off in terms of programs or accountability, or ignoring performance metrics. Endowment is just one measure for non-profits- but there are a LOT of lazy non-profits out there, with paid professional staff who phone it in, a board which rubber stamps their decisions and compensation increases, and auditors who are happy to work a 30 hour week when it comes to scrubbing down the books.
Seen it, been there. But who exactly does the crowd here want to tax??? And what behaviors are we trying to stop or encourage???
My issue with these large non-profits is their lack of support for local infrastructure since they don’t pay local taxes. Are they paying their fair share for local services such as fire and police departments, etc.
"Plaintiffs argue because Princeton is earning millions of dollars in patent royalty income and distributing some of that money to faculty, it is therefore involved in commercial enterprise and isn’t entitled to its tax exemption, attorney Bruce Afran said. "
another article written in 2011 so the numbers provided are no longer current but give an idea of how much these universities aren’t paying in local property tax.
“The endowments at Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis, Dartmouth College, Harvard, and MIT—which collectively own $10.6 billion in tax-exempt real estate, would owe $235 million per year in property taxes if they were not tax-exempt…”
'There’s some question whether Harvard should be classified as a university or as a hedge fund at this point. Some have described Harvard as “a large hedge fund that maintains a small educational institution on the side, for the tax preferences.” ’
If Harvard is a hedge fund it’s rather curious one. To begin with it would be a hedge fund with exactly one customer - itself. In addition, it also spends a good chunk of its revenue operating one of the most successful universities on the planet. I’ve don’t know of any other hedge fund that does either one of those things, much less both.
Moreover, most hedge funds are limited partnerships. By contrast Harvard is a corporation, the oldest corporation in the western hemisphere.
