Stephen Moore, whose son graduated from Northwestern to the tune of $62,500 a year for room board and tuition, explains why Hillary Clinton’s college tuition plan won’t work. In fact it will only make things worse in an industry (higher education) that has seen little productivity improvement.
Hillary’s plan would only make the crisis worse by having the taxpayers foot even a larger share of the cost of tuition. She wouldn’t make it free — that’s the Bernie Sanders idea — but only a small fraction of college cost would be borne by the students. This third-party payer system is what has caused the spiral of inflation in tuitions in the first place. The only other industry that has a similar government payer system is health care, and look at the runaway costs there.
When universities pay professors $200,000 a year for teaching 3 hours a week, shouldn’t every state college and university be audited for waste and fraud? And before giving a dime to private institutions, Mr. Moore suggest that donors insist “on an open the books transparency.”
What about college endowments and their vast storehouses of wealth? Harvard and Yale, for example, are among the dozens of colleges “that could pay 80% of the tuition out of their endowments and not run out of money over many decades if ever.”
Finally, Mr. Moore asks, shouldn’t students who receive partial or free tuition be asked to work 10 to 25 hours a week? Students not only would help foot the tuition bill, but also would likely learn as much from the workplace as from the classroom experience. Read Moore here.
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