“The elite universities including Princeton and Yale admit more students from the top 1% of earners in America than from the bottom 60% combined.” (Equality of Opportunity Project) Shocked? Isn’t that business as usual in the empire where the rich, particularly the super-rich (aka politicians’ best friends) get to ride roughshod over the rest of us? If you’re a university whose annual cost to attend is $76,000 and climbing, doesn’t it follow that 70% of your students will come from the top-earning 20% of families. 20% will come from the top 1%. (“It’s a big club and you aint in it”- George Carlin)). It started over a hundred years ago when the sixteenth amendment gave Congress the power to levy taxes. Included in the new tax law was a provision allowing college and universities a free ride in the form of a tax exemption. The colleges cashed in. At the end of FY 2018, the four richest universities had endowments worth $119 billion (that’s Harvard, Yale Stanford, Princeton). What are the federal taxes due on $119 billion? If you’re a non-profit college: zero. On college-owned real estate. Once again zero. (Out of the goodness of their hard hearts, Yale agreed in 1990 to throw a few shekels into the city coffers, like the $8.5 million they coughed up one year for the 340 acres of prime real estate they own in downtown New Haven.) It wasn’t supposed to become a gigantic windfall. What it was supposed to be was a mutually beneficial arrangement — tax exemption from the government in return for these institutions providing a range of public services to their communities. If you think that’s what’s happening, you’re sorely mistaken. Find out why higher education has devolved into the playground of the super-wealthy by reading “U.S Colleges on the Dole While Students Wind up Debt Slaves: All in a Day’s Work in the Empire.”
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