Professor Schumer's Motive

Senator Schumer's "Make College Affordable Act" may look like a great idea in the wake of news that tuition at private, four-year colleges has increased faster than inflation for the umpteenth year in a row, but if Mr. Schumer gets his way, the problem will only grow worse. The bill Mr. Schumer's touting would allow parents with joint income up to $100,000 to deduct as much as $12,000 a year in their children's college costs from their taxes. It would also ease the burden on student borrowers by allowing annual deductions of $1,500 for student-loan interest during the first five years of repayment. But appearances to the contrary, "Make College More Expensive Act" would be a more appropriate title for this legislation.

College tuition is one of the few remaining expenses that eats a growing proportion of family income even as most other costs have been shrinking in proportion to income, as two experts on the issue at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Richard Vedder and Bryan O'Keefe, noted recently in these pages.

Controlling costs within colleges is difficult for even the most committed managers. Professorial productivity, at least in respect of hours spent actually teaching, is held low by expectations that professors will also devote a lot of time to their own research. Universities generally cling to the decentralized organizational structure inherited from the Middle Ages in which professors have more power over their employers than just about any other worker in the economy. Academia cherishes the notion that it should be an entity apart from the rest of society, that it's somehow offensive to expect colleges to make the same kinds of rational economic decisions with which other businesses must grapple.

If anything, Mr. Schumer's proposal will depress college attendance among the poorest students. Universities have come to look at any tuition tax deduction as free money, since it insulates parents and students from the full sticker price of college education and makes them more tolerant of higher tuition bills. Yet that's only true for families at the upper end of the middle class who stand to benefit most from this kind of tax deduction but would find a way to send their children to college anyway. Lower income students, who don't pay enough income taxes to benefit from the deduction and are also the most sensitive to tuition increases, only see the higher bill.

So what explains the fascination of Mr. Schumer and other Democrats for this kind of tax credit proposal? One clue may be that much of the additional tuition money such measures allow colleges to raise ends up in the hands of faculty in the form of higher salaries, to the point where opponents have been known to call similar proposals "Faculty Salary Enhancement Acts." Considering that Mr. Schumer is a master campaigner who engineered the Democratic takeover of the Senate and college faculties form one of the most reliably Democratic voting blocks in American politics, one can't help but suspect that Mr. Schumer's bill is about more than just making college more affordable for the middle class. If Mr. Schumer were really serious about college affordability, he'd be cutting federal aid, thus forcing colleges to do a better job of controlling costs.