On Thu, 25 May 2000, Brad De Long wrote:
> >Screw the loans, free tuition! But otherwise, I'm with you (and tech
> >xfr is one are where U.S. unions are very very bad). Much better to
> >focus on a positive agenda than the eternal "No!" to trade deals.
> >
> >Doug
>
> Yeah. But I remember the meeting at which Berkeley Provost Carol
> Christ said that she thought it was *unfair* to charge Berkeley Law
> and Business School students more tuition than Arts and Sciences
> graduate students because then they had no post-school option other
> than to go to work for the corporate sector.
>
> Pleas that income-contingent loans were even fairer fell on deaf ears...
However, it is ultimately simpler to give everyone free tuition, then use a progressive income tax to "get back" the funds from the corporate law and business types.
The problem of income-contingent aid is the problem of all means testing: it is ultimately hard to measure income and resources for individuals, when real resources are really based on the network of family and others that determine one's real economic opportunities.
This is hard to measure, since financial aid has to project the income of parents onto students, without a real measure of whether parents are willing to extend the help that the aid office assumes they should. Kids with abnormally stingy parents get screwed, whatever their place on the economic chart. An old girlfriend had to struggle for years because her parents had cut her off, yet financial aid assumptions said she should pay the full rate of tuition.
Free tuition with steep progressive taxation is much better.
-- Nathan Newman