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Comment by SamuelAdams | Hacker News Reader

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> Educating children is incredibly expensive. The regions are quite annoyed that they pay to educate their children but that Tokyo reaps all the benefits. This state of affairs has continued for decades.

We see the same problem in USA states. State taxpayer dollars pay for some amount of public college education for state universities. These are typically called "State Appropriations", and varies between 30-80% of the student's overall tuition costs.

Back in the 1980's, taxpayers footed most college tuition using state appropriations, so college was "cheap" for students back then. Now (2023), (at least in my state, Michigan), state appropriations typically cover 20-40% of a college student's tuition.

There is concern with this though, because of what is called "brain drain". Citizens spend all these taxpayer dollars educating youth at colleges, then the graduates from U of M, etc all move out of state to California, Boston, Seattle, etc for big tech jobs.

Then the state of Michigan doesn't see any more tax dollars from those students. Which begs the question, why pay tax dollars for higher education if those who benefit from that education do not contribute back?

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This is a perspective issue.

The customer was the in-state parent. Rest assured, they were taxed just fine.

The child, when it finishes college, should do whatever is best for the child.

If the kids are leaving the state, the problem is the state isn't attractive to the next generation. Not that the kid somehow skipped out on the state. Heck, the state had an inertial advantage over every other state and still couldn't keep the kid there.

Source: I grew up in Pennsylvania. Love the place. Left for greener pastures. Don't owe them anything out of my paychecks today. But my parents kicked into their coffers for decades and still do.

I'm trying to see both sides, but how is the parent the customer here?

I think you're mixing an opinion on high taxation in general (which you might be right about), versus how big metropolises enjoy labor that was raised somewhere else.

Of course the parent is the customer. Generally the parent is the one who makes sure the child is wel prepared for the future. College is a step in that process.

I agree that the parent is a beneficiary of the education, but my argument is with the fact that "customer" involves one beneficiary. By your logic for instance anyone that's childless shouldn't pay taxes for education, even though they benefit indirectly from an educated population.

Isn't the company that's hiring the graduate just as much a beneficiary for instance?

One of the biggest functions of primary education beyond preparing the kid for their future is as a free(ish) place to stick your kid during working hours. Look at what happened during COVID when schools were shutdown it caused a lot of problems because suddenly someone had to take care of the kid during the day. The chaos that change caused alone is I think excellent evidence for that. It's also why schools happen so early even though it's clinically proven to be an inferior time to start school for the kid, they have to start that early so the parent(s) can get to their 9-5 job.

Simple. It’s not based on the child’s taxes (or future taxes) because then they could go to a California college, claim residency there immediately, and get California prices. Instead, I have to pay an extra $30k or so for them. Further, they haven’t paid any taxes before college, because they were in high school. So again, the fact that each state gives “local” kids a break has nothing to do with the kids taxes. Kids haven’t paid taxes, and kids moving state doesn’t change fees.

What does matter? My taxes, as parent. I pay soooo much taxes and I will continue to do so. As a result my kid is essentially forced to go to a college in state. And he will then FOR SURE move out of state. But I won’t.

So. It’s a cost to me. Like we are considering moving back to CA to get the UC discount. I will pay more in taxes but I’ll get a chunk of it back in tuition break.

The parent is who determines where the child lives during the time when the child's residency is established for in-state tuition purposes. The parent is who votes for elected officials in the state. The parent is who suggests to the child the viability of a subsidized in-state education.

"Go to State" is a recommendation from the elders. If the parents poo-poo State the kid won't consider it seriously.

counter-argument: by not having to appeal to (most) families, big cities can focus on attracting young professionals, hence the original moniker: YUPpies.

so if this holds water, wouldn't we expect these educated professionals to return to the states which appeal to families when they are ready to start one?

People are trying to find stability in a unstable system. The system is unstable because of the shifts in the North America (and World) economy. With manufacturing leaving the US, and the US focusing more on the service industry, the economics of scale of the service industry favour centralization in urban areas, so thats where the jobs end up being created. If the current system stay in place for long enough, it will become stable, with multi generation families having entire cycles in a given region. It's the same thing that happened to coal country, just in a larger scale, and slower.

Aye. If gauranteed remote was a thing I'd be out of the city -- and fast.

But RTO is still contentious, and the ability to find a job if I moved to vaguely-near-Boise would be terrible. One misstep at work, or even just another economic shift, and I'm moving again.

But I'd love to be in a smaller city. Annapolis MD, or coastal WA or deep mountains MT, whatever.

Why would they need to move back to their original state instead of over moving to a small city or into the suburbs?

I'm sure a non-insignificant group do move to one spouse's hometown, since I can assure you, having your kids' grandparents close by can be life-changing (especially for modern, dual-income families).

I'm seeing a lot less of that among people my age who are having kids. Most stay wherever they've setup their lives but move to a larger house or something similar.

I see the same, but I think the consequences hinted at by the GP are very present. I know quite a few parents, some with their parents nearby, others without. The ones with their parents nearby universally have more of an ability to do things without their kids (either regularly, or as a special-case).

And I know several parents who tried the "go it alone" method for a while, but eventually decided to move back to one of their hometowns, specifically to be closer to their parents for reasons related to their kids. Most of it seems to be a mix of wanting nearby, reliable childcare, as well as just wanting their kids to grow up with regular contact with their grandparents. (I've also seen the phenomenon where the grandparents, after retirement, end up moving to the parents' location, but often that requires the grandparents to move to a higher cost-of-living area, so I expect that happens less often.)

I don't plan to have kids, so this is certainly a grain-of-salt-worthy opinion, but it feels to me that parent-marriages would be on average healthier if the parents had easier childcare options so they can more often do "date night" type things. Certainly nearby grandparents is not the only way to achieve that, but it is one of the simplest options, assuming grandparents who are happy to be involved to that degree.

There are a couple of probably significant factors that would counter such a tendency.

First, the states with the big cities they moved to also have smaller towns outside those cities that are fine for families. They can move to one of those and still have sufficient contact with the city to maintain their career.

Second, their spouse likely is not from the same state they are from, and may not want to move to that state. And they may not want to move to where the spouse is from.

Sometimes they do. But someone who's uprooting their life like that is probably semi-retiring - at least reducing their hours, having one partner stop working, that sort of thing. And not everyone starts a family, so the cities keep some of the most productive people forever - of course that's unsustainable, but it's not the cities' problem.

I would love to hear a realistic plan how West Virginia could make itself as attractive as NY, Chicago, etc.

I think the question is not how to be as attractive as NYC where people from all over move to West Virginia, but rather how to make it so that young people in the 60-90th percentile feel like they may as well stay.

A possibility is a great affordability ratio - cheap housing as compared to the prevailing local wage.

Remember, inertia to stay where you you are from is strong, you just have to help it along

Affordability ratio is not the reason young people are moving to NYC. Even with the much-higher salaries (assuming you can find similar jobs to compare), you're going to have a very tiny living space in NYC. More likely, the issue is 1) the jobs in NYC simply don't exist in WV, and never will, and 2) even if the WV person is comparing similar jobs, WV will never offer the lifestyle that NYC offers.

Affordability may not be why people are going to NYC -- but it's absolutely why people are moving to Pittsburg and a few other rust belt areas popping with hipsters.

WV ain't got that tho -- Pitt is at least a real city, and it's mostly filling in after the collapse of industry.

Knocking down all the dirt hills until you have enough flat land to build a city the size of NY or Chicago?

What is your opinion of Chattanooga, TN?

Whatever reason the old city isn't attractive to the next generation, it is completely reasonable for people to want to fix it at the national level.

If you don't, you will only concentrate all kinds of problems on your largest cities, and even invent some wild new problem because cities can not survive all by themselves.

That said, a tax based on what city you happened to be born or identify with is the kind of weirdness that my culture can't assimilate. But it may make complete sense there (maybe because it's more traditionalist? do they want to be that traditionalist?).

There are too few incentives at the national level. Rent seeking makes the federal government lazy. They don't have to do anything. To what country will you go? Nowhere. Coke just has to beat Pepsi by the thinnest of margins.

There's no need to build another New York City when we already have New York City. It would be folly for the federal government to stand up a competitor to New York City.

But! It's not folly for Illinois or California to try. Competition is good.

They might be "trying", but they're failing miserably. I'd say they aren't really even trying to make a competitor to New York City: no place in America looks remotely like it. I don't see any American city attempting to make itself dense, walkable, and with a decent subway system, except maybe DC (but that one has structural challenges because it's split across 3 states for stupid historic reasons).

I don't think California has failed in making competition for NYC in SF or LA. Yes, they aren't exactly like NYC, and they have different benefits, but they attract as much of the nation's (and world's) mindshare these days.

The biggest attraction of SF and LA is the weather.

Weather is some of it, but that isn't close to the biggest appeal of those cities at all. Many of us like SF and LA way better NYC, and NYC weather really isn't that bad (from my limited 3 month stay there).

If it's the past 3 months, those aren't the bad ones. they're a bit hot. it's the next 5 to watch out for.

they're not that bad, but they're not everyone's cup of tea.

It was summer, and it wasn't a nice one. But NYC seemed fine in terms of weather for me.

But I really didn't like the culture, the roads, the housing, the way people drove. I'm just not suited for east coast life.

DFW, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix, There are a ton of up and coming metros that are growing 3–5% a year while NYC is in decline along with LA and Chicago.

Sure they are not prioritizing “walkability” (i.e walking through human feces and crowds of homeless people). Heck FL recently surpassed the population of New York state for the first time in history, not many seemed to notice. They’re not competing, they’re winning.

I'm curious about your opinion of the states' decisions to reduce funding for public universities.

Neither the state collectively, non-parent residents of the state, nor the in-state parents get any future economic reward for funding higher education if the student leaves the state, so reducing the state's costs in that regard seems rational.

But that reduction in funding was part of the rise of the student loan industry, which subsequently seems to have completely deranged higher education funding.

What is the reason to have higher education organized by geography instead of by industry? Shouldn't the medical industry be responsible for medical education, for example? Then you don't have a state or a city wasting investment on a student who will bail, and you don't have students who are disadvantaged for being born in the wrong state or city.

The short answer is "history".

A longer answer is that I suspect it's a bad idea in the long term. For one thing, I don't see how you wouldn't have "students who are disadvantaged for being born in the wrong state".

>Neither the state collectively, non-parent residents of the state, nor the in-state parents get any future economic reward for funding higher education if the student leaves the state

That seems to presuppose that the students don't benefit from the education and/or there's no interstate commerce.

The students benefit, but are now in San Francisco looking for a MTFAANG job.

I'll admit neglecting interstate commerce as a second order effect.

> the problem is the state isn't attractive to the next generation

Part of the problem is that brain drain is a vicious cycle. Your home state is less attractive in part because of all the people in your field who left for "greener pastures".

And they have less funds to put into projects that might make the area more attractive, because they can't tax the people who left.

I'm not saying you owe anything out of your paycheck, but it is a problem. Both for the places being left and the overcrowded cities people are leaving to.

Alaska has had to deal with an extreme version of this issue for a long time. One mitigation that the state has come up with is to offer competitively priced student loans to Alaska residents who are bound for colleges across the US. The interest rate on the loans is further lowered if you live in Alaska after graduation, incentivizing educated Alaskans to come back. Those students are also likely to have maintained their Alaska residency to qualify for the Permanent Fund Dividend (an annual payment that comes from rolling returns on the state’s sovereign wealth fund).

I went to michigan and tons tons tons of people ended up at the auto companies. Sure many left the state, but there's no doubt that the state had many more educated high earners because of the university.

Its up to the state then to ensure they create an environment that attracts these recently graduated students!

Listen to what these post graduate students want - for those who are moving a city like NYC or Boston they are probably enjoying not having urban sprawl, fun downtown areas, available housing, easy and accessible public transportation, etc.

> Listen to what these post graduate students want - for those who are moving a city like NYC or Boston

I totally agree with everything you’re saying and listed but let’s not pretend the biggest item is anything but “higher salary” for most. We all know that some of these major metros have companies that pay 5-10x what you’d get in a small midwestern town.

Anecdotally, I did an internship in Cleveland followed by an internship in Santa Clara (Silicon Valley). I got job offers from both and chose California. The Cleveland company was a major donor to me school, so I got hounded by the schools career development office about why I chose to go to Santa Clara instead. They asked what the company could do to be more attractive to me - they mentioned intern ice cream parties, and Friday hours worked, and mentor programs, etc. The intern pay was $18/hr vs $80/hr, and when I brought it up, that was not a good answer - they wanted something cheaper easier and more superficial to change.

My point is that NYC and Boston have nothing to worry about, and nothing will change.

Hey, now, cut all the hours off every day other than Friday and then a 78% pay cut starts looking okay.

> I totally agree with everything you’re saying and listed but let’s not pretend the biggest item is anything but “higher salary” for most. We all know that some of these major metros have companies that pay 5-10x what you’d get in a small midwestern town.

there's a lot of places in between "random midwestern town" and NYC that handily beat both on wages to COL ratio. even just looking at other major east coast cities like DC, atlanta, or boston, NYC is far more expensive and typical engineer pay is only a little higher.

On the other hand, if college were still affordable, students could stay where they wanted instead of being all but forced to move to cities with higher salaries. For every 1 software engineer who flees to Silicon Valley, I bet there are 20 accountants, teachers, and nurses who'd like to continue living in their home state if they could afford it.

There is a similar phenomenon with Canada, and the USA. University is cheaper and more subsidized in Canada, and then a small but significant % of graduates - often some of the very best - move to the USA, and then never pay another tax dollar towards education, or anything else. It might be a bit annoying, but there's little that can actually be done about it, and all the usual arguments about the benefits of an educated populace still apply; the vast majority don't move away.

Pure spitballing. What if: in exchange for fully subsidized schooling at a state school, graduates participated in a profit-sharing agreement with the country and city that they went to school in? Similar to the Lambda model (what happened to them anyways?).

Sued by former students: https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardconroy/2023/03/29/former-...

Yikes! Well this seems like a place where colleges are socialized better: we all know that getting a college degree, especially certain degrees, are no indicator of employability.

Sure, but Lambda got sued for misrepresenting material facts about the deal to their students. I don't think this lawsuit (or Lambda's actions) invalidates the idea GP presented.

I don’t disagree, I was just responding to the person who asked what had happened to Lambda :)

"Profit-sharing agreement" is economically the same thing as "indentured servitude", which is illegal (for good reasons IMO).

Under that line of thought, wouldn’t taxes also be indentured servitude? Or loans? IMO the key is that the government will need to take a loss on the “loans”.

> Under that line of thought, wouldn’t taxes also be indentured servitude?

Taxes are much like indentured servitude. We allow the government to do things that we wouldn't allow private entities to do.

> Or loans?

Loans for specified amounts are legal, subject to some fairly strict protections (limits on APR, discharging them in bankruptcy, lots of required disclosure). You can't generally write a profit-sharing agreement that way - how would you tell the person how much they're going to have to repay? How would you stop them declaring bankruptcy immediately to get out of it?

In the US, there are programs where various federal agencies will pay for your education, and offer you a job on graduation. At a high level, the terms require you to repay the cost of education (prorated) if don’t work for that agent for a certain period of time.

I can see this working in Canada (or other states that want a boost in educated citizens). Subsidize education via forgivable loans, then forgive the loans if you work in-state. The main issue I see is that the US has a terrible history with loan forgiveness. You always hear stories of (eg) teachers who should get their loan forgiven being rejected for some paperwork issue or simply bank fraud.

Canada is probably a net recipient though -- lots of our immigrants were educated in South Africa, Turkey, Iran, et cetera. I suspect we gain more from other countries than we lose to the States.

> but there's little that can actually be done

Decrease taxes, encourage entrepreneurship and VC funding, and Canadian salaries will rise while cost of living will come down.

While not a perfect program, it seems to me that NY State's "Excelsior scholarship" (for those who's family has a household income of <$125k) is one possible answer to that.

College tuition is free, you're required to live and work in NY State for the same number of years that you accepted the state funding for after graduation. If you don't do that, the scholarship/grant becomes a loan.

This probably works in NY as it's a good place to start a career after college. Try doing this in West Virginia, Alabama or North Dakota. If you took that program after graduating you'd probably find yourself working for low wages and being underemployed.

>We see the same problem in USA states. State taxpayer dollars pay for some amount of public college education for state universities. These are typically called "State Appropriations", and varies between 30-80% of the student's overall tuition costs.

And the world yell the same thing to USA. Canada, Italy, and England etc. all subsides their world-class universities with public funding. Where do the students go after graduation? US.

> Then the state of Michigan doesn't see any more tax dollars from those students. Which begs the question, why pay tax dollars for higher education if those who benefit from that education do not contribute back?

People who live in Michigan might hope that their children can access a good education.

> all move out of state to California, Boston, Seattle, etc for big tech jobs

Seattle is busy complaining about all those tech jobs, and how unfair it is that they make lots of money.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/the-splitting-of-s...

Hate if you do, hate if you don't. If there were no tech jobs, people here would complain that they don't have them. If there are tech jobs, they complain that there are too many, when in reality they are complaining because they are missing out.

I do suspect that there would be different people complaining in those two cases (with some overlap, sure).

Either way, the complains are pretty irrational. I live in San Francisco, where all the property owners are thrilled that their home value has surged in the past couple decades. Take away all the tech jobs, and see what happens to those home values... Can't have your cake and eat it too.

Yeah, Seattle is the same.

I don’t get why money is so concentrated in NYC and SV

Why are people willing to pay more to get you to move to those areas? It just seems really weird, like there’s some man behind the curtain pulling strings to concentrate people in the above metro areas

Because there is money there, it's a virtuous cycle. NYC with wall street and tech, SV with VCs and tech. It's the place to be for those things, which makes it the place to be for those things, which brings more money in for those things, repeat.

Because that's where the businesses and business connections are. It's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. NYC & SV are successful business hubs because they are successful business hubs. Sure, they both had to start somewhere, there's no guarantee of their continued dominance, and that's not to say other business hubs can't come into their own, but it's going to be an uphill battle for new locales wanting to attract talent.

The pandemic & work-from-home made people realize that these hubs aren't really as crucial to business success as people thought they were, but there's still a lot of institutional inertia (not to mention shitty companies requiring employees to return to office for no real reason aside from managerial power trips).

> I don’t get why money is so concentrated in NYC and SV

For the same reason that Detroit was the technical hub 100 years ago.

Smart people congregating leads to more smart people congregating.

It is way worse in a state like Wyoming: https://wyomingtruth.org/brain-drain-majority-of-university-... (66% leave after graduation). Utah, however, is pretty good about keeping its graduates in state (as well as grabbing some of Wyoming's).

The real question is whether Wyoming should be a state at all. With 1 million distributed over a vast rural area and no real city.... ofc young people are leaving.

America has a 40x gap between its smallest and largest state. Leaving Wyoming is the same as leaving SF for San Jose in population terms.

I think this is what makes the article so interesting of this hometown tax idea, as I would have liked to have participated if it was here. Fwiw, I moved away from UofM to California for career building last decade, but I moved back this year as I do love Michigan, the highly volatile weather and all.

Thank you for saying Michigan is your state. Context matters a lot. It’s annoying when people generically use “in my state” or “in my country”.

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