Wealthy colleges like Penn should pay taxes to address educational injustice

A tiny number of higher education institutions monopolize our attention — often Ivy League institutions such as Harvard or Penn. Perhaps that’s not surprising, considering the degree of wealth and resources that are concentrated in those colleges and universities.

According to a report by the Education Trust, in 2013, 75% of all the endowments for colleges and universities were held by only 3.6% of all institutions. These colleges educate a fraction of all college students and even fewer low-income students, yet the attention we give them is outsized.

This disparity is a clear case of educational injustice.

In New York state, a group of legislators is tackling this inequality in higher education directly. They are proposing eliminating tax breaks for the wealthiest universities (New York University and Columbia) in the city and using that money to fund the City University of New York (CUNY), the largest city-based public university in the nation. The bill would stop New Yorkers from effectively subsidizing these wealthy universities, even though most of their children have little chance of attending them.

If this legislation succeeds, it has the potential to address one of the most glaring inequalities in higher education. It could also provide a model for our own city.

» READ MORE: Penn, Jefferson, and Drexel should pay their fair share of property taxes | Opinion

I work at the University of Pennsylvania, the wealthiest private institution in Philadelphia. But as a nonprofit, it also does not pay property taxes. Meanwhile, Temple University and the Community College of Philadelphia educate our city’s neediest students.

Before I came to Penn, I taught at CUNY and saw firsthand the impact of educational inequality on students. At Penn (where, according to college planning tool College Raptor, the endowment per student is more than $600,000), my students live in beautiful dorms and have access to a wide range of resources to help them succeed. I teach first-year seminars with fewer than 20 students. I get to know my students. When they need support, I can send an email and a team will get involved — writing tutors, student life deans, mental health professionals. The system, fallible as it is, is designed to ensure students receive the help they need to keep succeeding.

This stands in stark contrast to my experience teaching at the City College of New York (CUNY), where the estimated endowment per student is roughly $20,000. The students were as motivated, brilliant, and interesting as my students at Penn — full of stories and lives that were as different from each other as could be. But they faced a multitude of challenges in their path toward a degree, such as being non-native speakers of English, or having to hold a job outside of school to cover expenses, and CUNY had far fewer resources to help them.

I would direct CUNY students to the resources available on campus, knowing full well that these offices were so overburdened by relentless belt-tightening enforced by state lawmakers in Albany that there would often be little our institution could do to get these struggling students back on track.

Over the 10 years I taught at CUNY, the number of students in my classes increased. When I started, one of my writing-intensive courses had 25 students — a challenge, given how much hands-on help each student would require, but manageable. By the end of my time there, the same course had 40 students.

Some CUNY professors would teach as many as five such courses in a semester. Students were supposed to learn to write college-level essays in this course, but with 40 students and no teaching assistants, it was virtually impossible for me to provide valuable, detailed feedback on every writing assignment. So it became a writing course in name only. I’d advise students who needed help with their writing to make an appointment at the writing center months before their term papers were due; only then would they have a chance of getting more help with their writing.

Still, I know many students who would likely have fared better if they’d received more help. But the resources CUNY had to offer couldn’t keep up with what they needed to succeed.

Low-income students in our city face similar challenges. Whether they attend Temple (endowment $22,000 per student, according to College Raptor) or the Community College of Philadelphia (endowment less than $2,000 per full-time student, based on the fiscal year 2021 endowment), their path toward mobility involves jumping through obstacles rather than being buoyed to the finish line by resources.

There are many glaring inequalities in Philadelphia, but surely this is one our legislators ought to have the courage to tackle.

If the legislators in Albany succeed, it will be a win for equality in higher education, one that Philadelphians should consider emulating. Our elite universities conduct important research and can play a vital role in civic life, but that’s no reason to allow obscene inequalities in institutional wealth.

Jennifer Morton is a Presidential Penn Compact associate professor of philosophy with a secondary appointment at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.