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Thursday, January 18, 2007
Rent.'The truly rich schools can and should simply end tuition for all. Harvard, Yale and Princeton, for example, all earn at least $75,000 in endowment income for every student, including graduate and professional students. With other private gifts and government grants, total non-tuition income per student far exceeds $100,000. This is several times the national average spending per student. If Berea College, Coopers Union and the service academies can be tuition free, so can Harvard, Yale and Princeton. The reason they are not is that these schools do not want to engage in a modest amount of belt-tightening that such policies would entail, and do not want to end the explosion in the salaries of their most prominent faculty and administrators that has gone on in recent years. Rent-seeking behavior trumps access issues or the national interest.' Richard Vedder, College Affordability |