<p>Obviously, universities, private or public, aren’t going to be able to compete with Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford or Yale. Those 5 universities have endowments that exceed $1 million/student. Elite publics have endowments per student in the $110,000-$220,000 range. That competes nicely with many of the top private universities, like Boston College, Brown University, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Penn, Tufts, Vanderbilt and a few others, particularly when you factor in the hundreds of millions of dollars that they receive in annual state and federal funding. </p>
<p>Only very few private universities, most of them quite tiny like Caltech, Rice and some of the elite LACs, will have the type of endowment per student large enough to compete with the likes of HMPS&Y.</p>
<p>I disagree though that state government is “entrenched”. In fact, with the progressive term limits that state government has, it’s flooded with inexperienced politicians who are there a short time to serve their own agenda. No one has experience to govern the 7th largest economy in the world.</p>
<p>In the 1960s and '70s California had the best roads, schools and public infrastructure. Prop 13 changed that…if Prop 13 hadn’t been passed, property taxes would have been much higher and it would have dampened the property price increases witnessed in the state. Sure, there are tradeoffs…the economy may not have grown as much, but it would be interesting to see what changes it would have made. </p>
<p>I think California should go to a Texas tax model.</p>
<p>I actually meant the legions of state workers in the state government. Yes Prop 13 was a significant factor in altering public finance in Cal. I actually worked for a city in SoCal (Simi Valley) when that passed and decided there was no future in that and went into the private sector–just goes to show you never know what good may come of bad things.</p>