In the last mile of a narrowing race, Donald Trump delivered his own plan to combat the college crisis everyone’s been crowing about—per the highly effective advice of progressive policy pollsters. Trump’s plan is no more his than Hillary Clinton’s Bernie Sanders-inspired plan is hers. Trump’s policy, just as perfect for populist yelling, threatened to lift the tax-exemption from universities with billion-dollar endowments.
He made his remarks during a rally in Aston, Pennsylvania on Thursday, the Washington Post reported:
Although it’s playing as a “new” plan, pressuring prestigious colleges to finance cost cuts with their enormous endowments is an old favorite among congressional Republicans. Just last week, the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight headlined a college affordability hearing, their second on the topic, “Back to School: A Review of Tax-Exempt College and University Endowments.” But, as the Urban Institute’s Sandy Baum told the panel, the real brunt of the college debt burden doesn’t fall to graduates of well-endowed schools, but to poor dropouts from community colleges and for-profits. Those individuals default on loans, on average, of less than ten thousand dollars. Proposed legislation would make an example of the approximately one hundred colleges with epic stockpiles of shrewdly invested funds.
The problem is that there are approximately only one hundred of them.
Trump’s parroting the nonexempt endowments idea, though, shares the same upside as Ways and Means’s seemingly narrow focus on top-down reform. That is, it kicks off a confluence of other creative solutions for the crisis-level cost of college. Panelists praised former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels’s income share agreement program at Purdue University, where he is president, pitched tuition freezes, and scoffed at schools’ out-of-control spending on spas, climbing walls, and administrators’ salaries.
When it comes to missing the point entirely—playing up a senseless but popular message where a meaningful solution is most needed—Clinton’s “new college compact” takes the cake. Her plan, aka Sanders’s plan slightly watered down, would make public universities free for 80 percent of American families. Small private colleges would be forced to close, despite meager supplemental funding that the Clinton “compact” shunts their way. And spots at prestigious publics would go to kids whose families would have otherwise ponied up at least part of an elite liberal-arts tuition. The priciest and most prestigious private colleges will depend more and more on wealthy families’ fronting full tuition. Heralded as a progressive policy, Clinton’s would hurt the poorest students and place a prestigious degree only further out of the reach of poor and minority students. A new study from Manhattan Institute fellow Max Eden examines the practical efficacy of Clinton’s plan, and finds that taxpayer dependence would damage colleges, while free tuition would fail to raise college graduation rates.
Let’s imagine the Republican candidate would, as he says, recruit cautious and studied, conservative problem-solvers to craft his administration’s policies. Just as Ways and Means welcomed experimental cost-cutting solutions, so might the candidate. Speculation aside, his position falls closer to the path of incremental meliorism than Clinton’s—a reckless plan that would be regressive in practice.
A previous version of this post misrepresented Eden’s study: Free tuition, he found, would likely increase college enrollment while failing to raise graduation rates.
