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HillaryBriss

why doesn't tax revenue rise at the same pace as student population?

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50 years ago 10% of kids went to college.

Now it's 50%.

That is just a change in participant behavior. No reason tax revenue would go up 5x without some big hikes.

We aren't just taking a 5% increase because people had more kids (which as you said, should be dealt with by natural tax increases)

Let's consider the distributional effects of giving college aid to 10% of the population vs. 50%. If the 10% were people who would not have otherwise gone to college, it looks like a good move to create income mobility and increase economic growth which will ultimately create more even tax revenue. If the 10% would have gone to college anyway and taken loans (and easily paid them back with their top 10% earnings), the aid starts to looks regressive instead. But when we are talking about 50% of the population, things seem different.

So is college a basic right of society?

I think it makes people as a whole make better choices. If we could get 100% of people to go to college (or even 90% or 70%), I don't think we would be worse off as a nation... but obviously it needs to be free or near free, not burdening everyone with 10 billion dollars in debt.

It seems like the high spending per student is a bigger issue than who is paying. If 100% of people go to college, a massive amount of money will be spent on college at current US rates (20 million people aged 20-23 * $20,000/year = $400 billion/year as an estimate). I'm not against income redistribution at all, I'm a big fan of it. I don't mind if the government takes half my Bay Area engineer salary. It would just make rents lower and I will end up with the same quality of life. However, I care about the ROI of that redistribution. If the government takes $100,000 from me I would much rather it pay for college for ten people than five people. But if college only cost $10,000/year total [0], the debt incurred by the student's contributions would be more manageable. And the $100,000 could go toward building a subway or something.

[0] the US spends twice as much per student on average (including all sources of funding, government and tuition). http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

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