EDUCATION/GOP/TAXES: “Universities are ramping up efforts to defeat a Republican plan to tax private-college endowments and other proposals that would hit their finances, as they confront a building wave of resentment against higher education.
Separate measures proposed in Congress earlier this year—some with bipartisan support—would demand universities pay back part of the loans on which their graduates default, and for schools to produce vast amounts of new data so consumers can better gauge the value of college degrees…
Student debt totals $1.3 trillion, according to the New York Federal Reserve, and tuition has climbed at triple the rate of inflation over the past decade, according to the Labor Department…
Perhaps no measure better represents the populist pushback than the House Republican tax plan, which calls for a new 1.4% excise tax on the annual investment earnings of the largest private-university endowments. The tax would apply to private, nonprofit schools with at least 500 students and endowments equal to at least $250,000 a student, under an amendment adopted by a House panel this week…
Republicans and other critics of colleges have criticized universities for socking away billions of dollars in endowment money that they say would be better used to reduce tuition and provide more scholarships.”
-Josh Mitchell and Douglas Belkin, “Higher Education Gears Up to Fight GOP Bill’s Tax on Endowments,” The Wall Street Journal online, Nov. 10, 2017 07:00am