> That model doesn’t really work to fund higher education. The public won’t accept doubling or tripling their property tax.
[citation needed]
And I can give you a citation against. In my local municipality the tax base is roughly $1.5 billion. The annual expenditures for the local vo-tech school for that municipality is $30 million. If all of the state and tuition funding for the vo-tech school suddenly vanished the property owners would see a rise of ... wait for it ... a grand total of 2%. Certainly a far cry from the doubling or tripling you suggested.
Amortizing the tuition across all public post-secondary institutions in the state via income and property tax bases of the entire state would likely be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-2% total every year. Based on that analysis it seems monumentally stupid to NOT publicly fund post-secondary education.
Ditch the NCAA sports programs and it probably gets cheaper. The whole sales pitch for sports is that scholarships provide a pathway for some students to go to college that otherwise could not afford it. Get rid of tuition and suddenly that reason goes away, too.
Colleges/Universities absolutely do not need more money...they need more accountability.
I'm not arguing with your numbers, I guess my point is that I don't think taxpayers will accept a huge "freebie" for one group which results in their taxes going up. The optics are terrible.
That model doesn’t really work to fund higher education. The public won’t accept doubling or tripling their property tax.