I read a lot yesterday. Let me pull out some of the best…
Are state colleges with low in-state tuition a handout to rich people?
A State Senator from Virginia still has the mental and physical scars from when his mentally ill son attacked him with a knife and then killed himself.
I love this article on the natural fixes for ADHD.
An excerpt from a new book about death written by a mortician.
Apt. 11d 
“..Are state colleges with low in-state tuition a handout to rich people?..”
Of course they are. Next question?
Basically any state program for which the income profile of beneficiaries is higher than the income profile of the taxpayers is a handout to rich people. This would likely include The Cloisters, and tax benefits for donation to opera, and the National Park Service.
Hiatt is dead right that the benefits of lowered-price higher ed are extremely skewed toward – well maybe not the Trump/Soros/Koch rich, more the 75th-to-95th percentile fortunate. Further, it enables parents to be much less skeptical about the climbing walls and other lushness which has come into campus life since I (barefoot! in the snow! uphill BOTH DIRECTIONS!) went to college.
Worth doing? We have hopes of getting our kids through with no debt. Low instate tuition is a big part of our strategy. Should some poor shlub flipping burgers in Manassas be helping us out to do that? Probably not.
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Yes.
The state colleges are the go-to solution for families who can’t quite afford to pay for both their kid to go to school and a poorer kid to go to school (which is essentially the expensive private college formula–it’s like TOM shoes, but for education).
We’ll do either 1) a local option (very inexpensive for us), 2) one of our excellent state colleges (still around $20k a year with living expenses) or 3) the deus ex machina private college academic scholarship option. I’m not counting on #3, but I’m not ruling it out.
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As pointed out in some of the comments in the article, a big part of whether low instate tuition subsidizes the rich depends on how much of the taxes are paid by the rich and what proportion of the tuition benefits are derived by the rich. If taxation depends on income and is sufficiently progressive, low tuititon does not have to be a subsidy to the, on average, richer students who attend university.
MD has a progressive income tax. A family making 300K pays about $15,000 in taxes. A family making 70K (about average), pays about $3000. A family making 23K (about poverty level), pays about $1000 (assuming no credits negate that amount. Resident tuition in U of Maryland is about $9000. That means the family making 300K is paying more than full tuition for U of M every year they make 300K, even without a child attending. The middle-income family might be paying the price of tuition (over the course of a life’s worth of income) and the poor kid is being subsidized (if they go). So, the presumption low tuition is a benefit for the rich depends on the tax structure is incorrect.
There empirical evidence of decreasing access to state schools for low-income students in states that have implemented a high tuition model based on this analysis (in spite of the promised high aid). Low in-state tuition is the means of providing access to low income students, and the states with low in state tuition do a better job of providing access.
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I don’t see how the progressivity of the tax base is persuasive on whether the subsidy provided by the low tuition is progressive. Separate issues, I think. There are a lot of public services provided by the state: police, roads, support for elementary education, historical museums, hunting enforcement. Some are more, some are less, used by 99 per centers, or 30 per centers.
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If the money for education comes from the same group of people, the progressiveness of taxation is fundamental the question about whether the service redistributes wealth to decrease unequal access or the exacerbate it. With the degree of progressiveness of MD’s tax base, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the >300K family draws more out of state sponsored education than the <50K family. Frankly, that might even be true if a very large proportion of students at U MD were high income, if the 300K family hasn't just moved into the state and has been paying taxes all along.
True, I'm only including university in this calculation, and it does matter what else the state spends its money on, and, the proportions of those services used by people of different incomes, so the real math needs to be more inclusive of all the state expenditures. And, I haven't seen that analysis done with numbers. The op-ed certainly didn't provide them at all, and relied on handwaving assumptions about the proportion of state college education services used by the "wealthy"). I'm doing a simplistic version, but, it's a sound idea that needs further analysis.
And, there is undoubtedly analysis that shows that raising tuition in state colleges decreases access to education, for lower income students and families.
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