CV NEWS FEED // A recent poll shows that significantly more voters support taxing the endowments of private institutions of higher education than oppose it.
Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini posted the results acquired by his firm, Echelon Insights, on X (formerly Twitter) Thursday.
“Likely 2024 voters support taxing the endowments of private universities by a margin of 49-20,” Ruffini wrote.
He noted that the Echelon poll shows “[s]trong bipartisan support and support across education levels.”
The survey asked respondents the question “Would you support or oppose legislation that taxes the endowments of private universities?”
Just under half of the respondents said that they strongly or somewhat support the proposed policy. Only 20%, or one in five, stated they were opposed. An additional 32% were unsure. (As with many official poll reports, the numbers add up to over 100% – in this case 101% – due to each number being rounded to the nearest whole number.)
With the respondents broken down among party “leaning,” Democrats were slightly more likely to be in favor.
Forty-five percent of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents indicated support, compared with 53% of pure independent voters, and 51% of Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents.
When the results were sorted by ideology of respondents, they conveyed a similar picture: forty-eight percent of conservatives, 47% of moderates, and 53% of liberals supported the policy.
Voters with only a bachelor’s degree were the most likely to support the taxing of endowments, with 55% of the cohort backing the proposal. Meanwhile, 48% of voters who attended college but have less than a four-year degree and 45% with no college experience were in favor.
The education group that was the least likely to support the taxing of private universities’ endowments was voters with graduate degrees. Forty-four who responded to the poll said they were in favor, with 23% opposed.
According to U.S. News & World Report (USNWR), “An endowment fund is a collection of financial assets that the school can periodically pull from to cover an array of costs while intentionally growing the fund over time.”
USNWR cited Andrew Gillen of the pro-school-choice Texas Public Policy Foundation who referred to endowments as “super-charged rainy-day fund[s].”
“The idea of the endowment is to generate a continuous source of resources for the university to spend,” he pointed out. Gillen elaborated that endowments are “under the control of either the university, or a group closely tied to the university.”
State Sen. Ryan Fazio, R-CT, wrote in reply to Ruffini’s post: “Every year I propose legislation to tax large university endowments in [Connecticut] at the normal capital gains rate & use the revenue to cut taxes on middle & working-class families.”
“It’s good to see public support for good policy,” added the Republican lawmaker. “Let’s get it done in CT–and beyond–in 2024!”
However, libertarian X user Michael J South disagreed. “No,” he wrote. “What we should be pushing for is #SeparationOfSchoolAndState.”
“End student loans,” South continued. “End government stranglehold on accreditation. End government curricula, forced attendance, everything, at all levels.”
Some academic leaders also reacted to the poll’s results.
“Has anyone thought through the implications of this for small, Christian colleges?” asked Jennifer A. Frey, the Dean of The University of Tulsa Honors College.
The University of Tulsa is a private institution that has a historic affiliation with the Presbyterian Church (USA). The university’s website describes its relationship with the denomination as a “connection.”
“This is bigger than Harvard, y’all,” Frey wrote.
The Echelon poll’s results come in the wake of the resignation of scandal-plagued former Harvard President Claudine Gay.
As CatholicVote reported last week, Gay’s exit followed multiple “plagiarism allegations and a widely panned response to campus anti-Semitism.”
>> BOMBSHELL REPORT: CLAUDINE GAY PLAGIARIZED PHD PAPER <<
In a heavily criticized New York Times op-ed she wrote the day after her resignation, Gay called the successful journalistic effort to expose her purported history of plagiarism “merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.”
“Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda,” she wrote.
