college tuition

The following item was published on the Federalist website sometime ago:

From the "Village Academic Curriculum" File...

"According to Ohio University Economics Professor Richard Vedder, the inflation-adjusted cost of college tuition is just about triple that of the 1970s. The average tuition increase this year is eight percent—down from the last two years' double-digit hikes, but still daunting nonetheless. Since 2002, the average tuition rate is up 36 percent, while consumer prices rose less than nine percent. Tuition is rising substantially faster than family incomes, a trend that will cause many problems in the near future.

For those who learned anything in economics class, one of the reasons is simple: federal aid has increased in double-digit percentages for years. As Vedder notes, "When someone else pays the bills, we become less sensitive to price." If tuition is $10,000 and the federal government pays $8,000, it won't be long before tuition is $18,000 and we'll just expect a larger scholarship next year. As usual, the solution lies in limiting the federal government's role in "helping" to constitutional enumerations—which means no more "help" at all. "

As one whose third and last child's final tuition bill was close to $50,000 (that's for one year room, board and tuition at NYU) just a few years ago, I am particularly sensitive to this disclosure by Professor Vedder. One has to ask where exactly does all this "extra" -- extra because it now costs at least three times as much in inflation adjusted dollars as when I went to college in the '50's --tuition go these days? Some years ago I wrote the newly appointed president, Richard Levin, of Yale asking him this very question and offerning my own suggestion that perhaps, among other reasons, the course curriculum had become bloated inasmuch as it was at least double, maybe more, what it was when I was an undergraduate. I asked if we really needed all these courses that seemed to be offered more to assuage the sensitivities of various ethnic groups than to advance the state of useful knowledge. To his credit Levin sent me a lengthy response (3 or 4 pages, single spaced, as I recall) which in essence offered two major reasons for the "extra" costs: 1). cutting edge higher learning institutions like Yale owed it to society to stay abreast of the explosion in knowledge going on and that, in general, 2) the cost of doing business was greater than in my day. Okay, I thought, that's at least a reasonable response, even though I still find it hard to believe any student today is getting three times as much value for his education dollar as I did 50 years ago. From the sounds of it todays' Yale student is getting less attention from professors and more from TAs, than we did. In fact the former Dean of Yale College, Don Kagan, in an op ed in a leading newspaper some time ago remarked that the classrom teaching load of the average professor is now about one-third what it was when he broke into the profession in the 1950's. No figures were given in this particular piece on compensation but I'd be willing to bet it's up by a factor of two or three in adjusted dollars. My question to President Levin is do we really need courses on obscure Carribean poets and related sociological subjects to satisfy the psychological needs of various minorities who weren't necessarily directly decendants in the grand march of western civilization from the Greeks, to the Romans, the influence of Christianity on western thought, the Reformation the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment? It's pretty clear that the "extra" tuition cash ends up in much higher professor's salaries, and many more professors than in earlier times. I don't envy my son who has two children under 8 and another one on the way.

Warren Buffet the democrat

I recently saw a video clip of Warren Buffett at a closed Hillary fund raising event at which he told the assembled loyalists why he was a democrat. Unfortunately the sound quality was such I couldn't understand a word he said but at the end of his little spiel he received a standing ovation from the paritsan worthies in attendance. I find this declaration of his to be not only strange but unsettling. As I understand from another blogger who actually heard the oracle from Omaha's words that what he said, which Hillary naturally loved and heartedly endorsed, was that if one is lucky enough to be among the 1% of the population with high incomes then it was obviously meant to be that one was entitled to a low tax rate. Buffett disagrees arguing that he and other high income people should be taxed much more than they are currently. There were no specifics here but simply that higher taxes were in order for higher income people. Soak the rich is, of course, a staple of Hillary's tax platform. Question: Haven't we been down this path before and didn't it fail to stimulate the economy and create jobs. As I recall, during and after WWII marginal tax rates were close to 90% for the highest income bracket and that caused JFK, a democrat, in 1960 to run on a platform to roll back taxes in order to get a stagnant economy going again. The argument then was the same as under Reagan and the supply siders of the early '80's: if the government in effect confiscates income above a certain level there are no savings with which to invest and create new businesses which stimulates the economy. Currently, we have almost no savings from the average wage earner, possibly even negative savings, and therefore to have a pool of capital available for investing in new businesses, it must come from the higher income earners. Many of these earners are small business owners organized as sub chapter S corporations which means their business incomes are taxed on the individual tax schedules that Hillary and Buffet want to see rise sharply, not the corporate schedule. Taxed away this income accrues to the government which redistributes it via various social safety net programs, the overall economy stagnates and ceases to create new jobs. We then have the Euro model of high unemployment, no growth, and economic stagnation but, we have the fairness of no huge disparity in after tax income like exists today. Who's right here, Hillary/Buffett, or the Reagan/Bush model. If she's elected we're bound to find out, aren't we?