This thread irritated me. More talk of taking from the “rich” to give to the poor - while also taking away from the individual rights and choices of people like my very middle-class family.
We are a military family - Many of us paid for college with ROTC scholarships & follow-on service. Others of us paid full-tuition at our colleges with savings that took 18 long years to accumulate and outside merit scholarships that required many hours of application time. We found innovative ways to pay for college.
We are definitely NOT rich, but the colleges we chose to attend are wealthier than some. While they are not Harvard, our colleges have endowments over $5B and are generous in giving out need-based financial aid. (Although, sadly, we did not qualify for any…)
We are enthusiastic about helping underprivileged kids attain college educations, but we are NOT supportive of creating a double standard in the tax code which would penalize some of the most generous need-blind colleges in the USA, to raise more money for Pell Grants for students to use at other universities.
BOTTOM LINE about the impact of your idea on individuals like those in my family: If we want to donate to our colleges, why should our personal donations be worth less to our colleges (after taxes) than the same dollar amount donations that other people might donate to their colleges that may have smaller endowments? Why should our colleges be penalized? Your idea, in essence, impacts the rights of my family members, because we want the full amounts of our hard-earned donations to be slotted to our colleges, and NOT partially diverted to Pell Grants for kids at other universities. I assume that our income taxes already support Pell Grants for others.
Instead of just redistributing the wealth of others, we need to figure out how more kids can EARN scholarships for college. Working hard on academics or sports in high school can often result in merit scholarships, already funded by colleges. Need-based financial aid is also already prevalent for the truly poor and under-represented students at most colleges. Additionally, I have worked on fundraisers for various outside scholarship foundations that raise money for needy students. ROTC and GI Bills are other avenues.
You seem to be great at figuring out how to spend other college’s/people’s money. I hope you are equally as generous at donating to scholarship causes out of your own funds. The concepts of more Pell Grants and the recent push for “free tuition for all” just mean that my family’s taxes (and our state or national debt) will likely increase to pay for college for other families. It is NOT free to us! We are already paying $65K/yr for our second son’s college, so we simply cannot afford to pay for everyone else’s kids as well!
Finally, our family colleges should not have to sacrifice well-deserved earnings to pay for grants that will go to students attending other colleges. That’s like saying IBM should supplement AT&T employees, because IBM made more money this year. Silly.