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December 2, 2008 12:03:32 PM CST

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Tax Harvard to Help Fund Poorer Colleges

Posted Dec 21, 07 4:17 PM CST in US,  Arts & Living 

(Newser) – The growing disparity between the richest universities and their more modest counterparts is not as often discussed as other aspects of America's wealth gap, prominent investment banker Herbert Allen writes in the New York Times—but it should be. The nation’s wealthiest colleges have endowments topping $1 million per student—thousands of times greater than those of the poorest.

With richer schools attracting the best faculty and students, Allen recommends an equalizer: Tax investment income (not endowments) of the richest schools and redistribute to the poorest. Schools like Harvard can afford it—it made $7 billion in capital gains last year alone—and should see it as a “down payment on their professed mission:” to create a better society.

Source New York Times

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Tourists look at the John Harvard statue at Harvard University December 19, 2000 at the main campus in Cambridge, MA.   (Getty Images)
People walk around the Harvard University''s main campus December 19, 2000 in Cambridge, MA.   (Getty Images)
Catherine Holahan, 21, from Teaneck, NJ, walks home after class on the campus of Princeton University April 23, 2002 in Princeton, NJ.   (Getty Images)
Hoover Tower is seen through a window at the Cecil H. Green Library on the Stanford University Campus December 17, 2004 in Stanford, California.   (Getty Images)
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Harvard • Yale University • endowment • Princeton University • income disparity


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