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Subject: Weekly Briefing: Trump could devastate top colleges' finances. Here's how.
The case against an endowment tax
Daniel Garcia for The Chronicle
A proposed tax policy could hurt colleges and society, argues Phillip Levine in an opinion essay for The Review. Last year, when he was a senator from Ohio, Vice President-elect JD Vance introduced a bill to raise the tax on college endowments to 35 percent. While President-elect Trump has not endorsed the bill, he’s supported the notion of increasing the endowment tax. If Vance’s bill were to pass, even the most elite institutions would drain their endowments and cut their operating budgets. And if that happens, colleges might seek to improve their bottom lines by reducing financial aid and enrolling fewer low-income students.
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A proposed tax policy could hurt colleges and society, argues Phillip Levine in an opinion essay for The Review. Last year, when he was a senator from Ohio, Vice President-elect JD Vance introduced a bill to raise the tax on college endowments to 35 percent. While President-elect Trump has not endorsed the bill, he’s supported the notion of increasing the endowment tax. If Vance’s bill were to pass, even the most elite institutions would drain their endowments and cut their operating budgets. And if that happens, colleges might seek to improve their bottom lines by reducing financial aid and enrolling fewer low-income students. Read Levine’s argument here.
Teens are doing AI research. Should you be worried? At the world’s largest artificial-intelligence conference, know as NeurIPS, many of the researchers were teenagers. The conference recently held its first research competition for high schoolers. As college admissions remain hypercompetitive and students want to make their mark on evolving tech, some high-school students are getting involved in AI research. But many in the computing community are concerned that this trend could set unrealistic expectations for students and further exacerbate inequities in a field that already has racial and gender disparities. Our Stephanie M. Lee has the story.
Freshman enrollment actually increased last fall. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center announced on Monday that a “methodological error” had affected its calculation of the number of first-year students enrolled this past fall. The numbers had showed that freshman enrollment had declined by 5 percent, but actually, it increased. Read more inEric Hoover’s story.
Last week’s most-read story: Beckie Supiano’s piece on how the pandemic and changes in K-12 education are affecting today’s college students.
A bonus: Beckie’s story is part of our series about teaching Generation Z. Read all those stories here.
Lagniappe
Read. The author of a romance-fantasy series is being sued for copyright infringement. The genre’s reliance on tropes makes it difficult to answer questions about original ideas. (The New Yorker)
Listen. Here’s a question that will resonate with academics: Is it fine to work all the time? This podcast episode explores the answer. (Search Engine)
