Opinion: Look Beyond Elite Universities

A government lawyer believes that donations to elite universities, such as Harvard and Stanford, do not benefit society or advance equality within higher education, he writes in an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times.

Martin Kimmel says that “endowment races,” in which major universities seek billions of dollars, have made the cost of higher education even further out of reach for most students.

Endowments among the top 25 schools in the nation grew an average of 16 percent during the 2006 fiscal year, he writes.

Mr. Kimmel urges Congress to re-examine colleges’ tax-exempt status, stating that taxpayers “do not have an interest in subsidizing ‘endowment races’ that suck scarce philanthropic resources from underfunded charities. They do not have an interest in helping any one school snatch a professor from another. And they do not have an interest in driving up the already high costs of higher education.”