November 9, 2003
ONE MORE ARGUMENT FOR A VOUCHER SYSTEM:
Rich Colleges Receiving Richest Share of U.S. Aid (Greg Winter, NY Times, 11/9/2003)
Poverty is hardly a rarity among the students of California State University at Fresno ...About three hours and a world away sits Stanford. Far fewer of its students are poor, yet the federal government gives it about 7 times as much money to help each one of them through college under one program, 28 times as much in another and almost 100 times as much in a third, government data show....
Brown, for example, got $169.23 for every student who merely applied for financial aid in order to run its low-interest Perkins loan program in the 2000-1 academic year. Dartmouth got $174.88; Stanford, $211.80. But most universities did not get nearly that much: the median for the nation's colleges was $14.38, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data on the more than 4,000 colleges and universities that receive some form of federal aid.
Nearly 200 colleges received less than $3 per applicant for financial aid....
As for the origins of the disparities, most veterans of university finance agree that they date back at least to the 1970's, when regional panels of educational experts, not formulas, decided how much colleges would receive.
Complaints about this system seem to assume that the purpose of federal funding is to help poor students go to college, rather than to support a liberal professorial elite in prestigious, tenured comfort.
Isn't it remarkable that we hear many complaints about inequality in the distribution of private sector incomes, but complaints about the much larger inequalities in government disbursements are rare? Kudos to the Times for a useful article.
Posted by Paul Jaminet at November 9, 2003 10:16 PMCSU Fresno versus Stanford . . . h'mmm . . . sounds like a case that Detective Victor Davis Hanson should be called upon to investigate.
Fred Jacobsen
San Francisco
The big time private donor's also go to the
biggies. It was kind of laughable when
supposed liberal Bill Gates gave a huge chunk
to Harvard when he probably could have built
up a more "deserving" private school or even
gave a nice chunk to U. Washington.
If private donors want to spread their money
around at the elite institutions that's find,
but if the government is going to send taxpayers
money around it should be put where it can get
the most bang for the buck and that's not Stanford,
Harvard or Berkeley.
Doesn't Harvard have a $19 BILLION endowment?
When do they start spending their own money???
Posted by: Sandy P. at November 10, 2003 10:41 AMSandy - When we run out?
J.H. - The government should let us, through tax credits, donate the money to the university of our choice. We would probably favor local schools or the universities we graduated from. In any case, the distribution would be far more fair.
But if the government must control the money, a voucher system that follows the students is better than this.
Posted by: pj at November 10, 2003 2:19 PM