Paul Krugman really does not seem to understand the effect of third-party payments, and he especially does not understand when it comes to the government and the cost of higher education. In a recent post, he implies that anyone who does not favor massive increases in Pell Grants does so because he does not want the "less fortunate" to have educational opportunities.
Of course, I have a solution: places like Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Stanford have huge endowments. Why not just offer free tuition at these places to students who are "less fortunate" and have admissions policies that will guarantee that people from poor schools can be accepted, no matter what their academic performance might be.
You see, Krugman both claims to be against a stratified caste system, and yet he demands that the USA become like Europe which is heavily stratified and where one's location in the higher-education hierarchy determines ones future. For that matter, the old Soviet Union had the same kind of system.
However, once upon a time, the USA was not stratified in this manner, back before the Progressives gained power and decided that "credentials" were more important than real qualifications. If Krugman really wished to get rid of this "caste" system he claims exists, then he would be in favor of giving entrepreneurs the freedom to produce and end the various regulatory policies of licensing and the like that serve to hold back deserving people.
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Harvard University's Endowment is $31.73 Billion dollars.
It's freshman enrollment is 2,188 students.
It's annual cost to students is $57,400
Using it's endowment, it could fully fund each incoming freshman class for more than 250 years!
If it is to use its endowment to fully fund each student for 4 years, it could do so for 60 years before it is depleted.
If it did this for one year, it would only deplete it's endowment by less than 1% ... Surely having all of that money in a simple interest bearing account would permit it to absorb such a hit in perpetuity, no?
And yet Exxon-Mobil's 9% profit margin is seen as completely egregious...
link to stanford's site. I imagine it is the same at Harvard, If you can afford it, you pay. If you can't, you don't. So they do put their money where their mouth is.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/finaid/undergrad/how/parent.html
"So they do put their money where their mouth is."
That link doesn't support your criticism of Anderson's post. Stanford still accepts federal money based on a student's ability to pay.
In other words, if you can't afford to pay the tuition, the government subsidizes you and then Stanford decides which costs to waive.
College inflation: you can thank likes of Krugman and Obama who think everyone should go to college for it.
College ed has been so devalued over the past two decades that it is sad!
Anderson misses the fact that Europe has been empirically shown to have higher levels of social mobility than the US.
Only Progressives have decided that credentials are more important than real qualifications? Is this why the private sector consistently favors college graduates over those without for high paying white collar jobs?
The next time you go out to a restaurant ask the waiter where he got his bachelor's degree from.
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