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“From each according to ability, to each according to need” was Karl Marx’s maxim and socialism’s guiding principle. UW-Madison’s “Madison Initiative for Undergraduates” describes the same principle like this:
“This Madison Initiative for undergraduates will increase tuition… in order to help provide a significant fund for need-based financial aid… Students with demonstrated need from families earning $80,000 or less will be held harmless from this Madison-specific increase…” In other words, tuition should flow from each student according to ability to each student according to need.
Many students rightly view this as unjust. Why, they ask, should the needs of one student be a claim against his fellow classmates? A frequently asked question regarding the initiative is: “Why should families making more than $80,000 a year subsidize students and families who are less well off?”
What is the university’s answer?
As if to puncture moral indignation and assure the questioners of their own inefficacy, the university responded by assuring students they’re all dependent on subsidized funding. The cost of tuition, they stressed, would be much higher were they not on the public dole.
Of course this is partly true. Parents (and non-parents) are forced to subsidize education through taxation whether they send their children to a public school or not. In this sense they are dependent on public schools if they hope to get some of their money back. But the dependence is imposed on these parents through taxation. The low cost of tuition is an illusion since the so-called subsidies are monies taken from parents in the first place.
The verdict? Don’t complain about being forced to subsidize your neighbor because other people are forced to subsidize you, including your parents. Talk about adding insult to injury!
The real answer is our leaders and intellectuals agree with Marx. They uphold needs as a moral claim on your life. They believe you have a duty to sacrifice part of your resources for those who lack them. This is the meaning of altruism and part of the Madison Initiative.
Increasing tuition to pay for need-based aid is not about helping the misfortunate or expanding the reach of education to the less well off. It is not about building a diverse environment or fostering a society of goodwill. All of these things require self-interest; they require parents and students to evaluate their goals and surplus income and decide how best to support their values, charitable and otherwise.
But allowing families to act in their self-interest — to decide whether they value supporting needy students — is what the initiative is designed to prevent. It is not enlightened self-interest they are seeking; it’s dutiful service.
This moral code of sacrificing the haves to the have-nots is vicious in theory and disastrous in practice. By enshrining need as a moral standard altruism destroys achievement and rewards dependence. Consider parents making over $80,000 who want to help their children through school. Instead of being encouraged to do so, they are penalized. They are told in order to help their children they must help needy children as well. This amounts to a tax on helping their children.
Instead of repealing this unjust burden, these students are encouraged to cut financial ties with their parents and apply for independent status — that is, to make themselves needy — so they may apply for financial aid. Indeed, Chancellor Biddy Martin encourages all students to apply for financial aid.
Thus parents who start out with the ability and desire to help their children through college are taxed and penalized in the name of the needy. The money collected from them is then used to “subsidize” their children’s education to the extent they can demonstrate need. This perverse system of penalizing ability and rewarding need is a race to the bottom. Need multiplies while the independent, self-sustaining student perishes. But this is a virtue for those who hold need as a moral standard. As the Chancellor indicated, she would like to see an increase in students requiring need-based financial aid.
UW-Madison should drop its immoral goal of sacrificing ability to need — the fact this practice is ubiquitous does not make it right. It should respect the self-interest of all students, families and alumni and recognize each student’s moral right to pursue his own goals and education. They are not the means to the ends of others.
Jim Allard (jeallar[email protected]) is a graduate student in biological sciences.
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Thank you, Jim, for your McCarthyism. By calling everyone a Pinko Commie, you’re progressing the dialogue in today’s desperate climate. By weeding out all the pseudo-Russians who want to destroy our republic, you have become the greatest American to ever live. As long as you keep your ideas simple, never see an issue for its complexity, you will one day find your face carved into Mt. Rushmore.
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Mr. Allard is correct. The new Initiative for Undergraduates is plunder, nothing more. It takes by force (although a student is free to go elsewhere for her education) for the benefit of others. It is immoral and needs to be identified as such. “Speaking truth to power” works for conservative voices as well as liberal ones.
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Jim we get it, you’re a rampaging libertarian wand couldn’t give a shit about poor people. Now stop writing these editorials, please, they’re a waste of ink and every single one is a retread of past ones.
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The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people�s money � Margaret Thatcher.
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12:49, shouldn’t UW charge at least as much for out-of-state tuition as one would pay for their home state’s school? (Example: Rutgers or SUNY)
Why should UW be giving away superior education for discount prices to students who have not in the past contributed to our state’s economy? Moreover, who will not stay in state upon graduation?
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Exactly right. The chancellor has usurped confiscatory power, normally reserved to the government, for the purpose of doing what the government (and by extension, the people of Wisconsin) have decided they are unwilling to do. Thus Biddy, who thinks the taxpayers of the state are too cheap to fully fund the subsidy she would like to give to those with lower incomes, intercedes between the legislature (the constitutionally designated taxing power) and the people to correct the mistake and help those less able to fund a UW education.
The chancellor admits as much in defining this “surcharge” as a means to make the university “affordable” — not to those who pay the full tuition, but for those who do not.
Assisting everyone in obtaining a higher education is a noble goal. I support the principle of publicly0-funded, land-grant state universities that offer to those of limited means an opportunity to become educated citizens. Governments, in my view, should invest much more in universities. In general, this is an important goal for society to promote.
BUT, it is not up to Biddy Martin to decide whether society is doing that enough or correctly. This is little more than wealth redistribution on her say-so, to get around the fact that under-funding from the state legislature, and a terrible waste of the national treasure by the federal government on military junk and imperialist adventure, have so skewed our priorities — indeed in a fashion that condemnable from a moral perspective — that our universities (and hospitals, schools, libraries, museums, etc.) are in desperate financial circumstances that lead chancellors to assume (social-engineering) powers that do not properly belong to them.
I recognize the problem of an inadequately-funded university. But if it is so persuasive, then make the case to the taxpayers of the state, indeed of the nation! Permitting an appointed official to exercise a power she has no business using, one that directly undermines the constitutional authority vested in a state legislature, is a dangerous and ill-advised policy.
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Good column. But I have to wonder why comments are allowed on this column critisizing the initiative, but there’s no where for me to comment on the Editorial supporting the tuition raises.
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Agreed, This is indeed just another example of altruism at UW-Madison. My parents do not make over 80,000 dollars, but that doesn’t mean I want other students parents to pay for my education.
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Jim, isn’t the real problem the existence of this university in the first place? Using tax dollars to fund education is what allows things like this to happen in the first place.
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http://www.admissions.wisc.edu/costs.php
http://admissions.rutgers.edu/0401.asp
Hey 3:30 Am I missing something or is resident Rutgers not about twice the cost of non-resident UW?
And isn’t non-resident tuition MORE than the cost of service? Doesn’t UW make a profit on non-resident students?
PS. It was a great financial hardship to send my son, who is the son, grandson & great-grandson of UW graduates, to UW but I’d told him when he was young I’d find a way. Unfortunately, out-of-state tution more than doubled before he started.
PPS. I hope that illegal aliens don’t get the resident tuition denied my son, when all 8 of his great-grandparents graduated from Wisconsin high schools, as did his mother and father.
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“I believe in wealth redistribution.” Barrack Hussein Obama. The actions of one marxist emboldens others, as Biddy Martin is demonstrating.
Eric Holder declared that “America is a Nation of Cowards”. Are you? You could set up a flash occupation of Biddy Martin’s office and express your grievances in the direct terms that Liberals and Marxists condone. OR you can do nothing and prove Eric Holder is correct.
I worked and paid my own way through college and earned a BS and MS engineering degree. To all of those similarly poor kids out there, you can do it also. You don’t need to steal someone elses money to be successful. You just need your own determination and unswerving resolve to succeed. It means hard work, long days, fatigue, and little time for social activities. It means working while class mates are partying in Florida on spring break. It may mean getting up at 3:30am to work for 4 hours before your first class of the day, every day. It means learning self discipline and self respect, rather than perceiving yourself as an victim. It means taking responsibility for yourself and working hard to change your circumstances for the better. You can do it. You can do it without the personal degradation of taking stolen goods from wealth thieving marxists. You will never be a victim again.
Now get out there and tell Biddy Martin and all of the thieving marxists to “go to hell”!
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Jim, can you please just shut up. You dissuade more people from becoming libertarians than Kyle Szarzynski does from the far-left. Seriously, you’re not doing the cause any good by continuing to write these columns.
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12:16 wrote: “Jim, isn’t the real problem the existence of this university in the first place? Using tax dollars to fund education is what allows things like this to happen in the first place.”
Yes, in a sense. It “allows” things like this because both are examples (or instances) of the same principle.
Using tax dollars to fund education is based on the same principle of altruism: some people must sacrifice for the sake of others. This tuition hike is just a particularly blatant and direct implementation of altruism.
It’s important to understand the principles guiding our policies. It’s important to ask whether those principles are correct and what they lead to in practice.
If need is a claim on the lives of others, then taxing individuals to pay for those who need an education is good; taking from those who have money ($80,000) and giving to those who don’t is even better; full socialism, where all wealth is distributed according to need, is best.
The question is: is need a claim on others or do individuals have the right to their own lives?
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Hey 3:30 Am I missing something or is resident Rutgers not about twice the cost of non-resident UW?
SHOULD BE
Hey 3:30 Am I missing something or is non-resident UW not about twice the cost of resident Rutgers?
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“…do individuals have the right to their own lives?”
NOT when it interferes with the needs of the state!!!