New Sales Tax on College Kids to Pay For The Fiscal Irresponsibility of Local Governments!!!

Now I have heard it all. The city of Pittsburgh wants to enact a 1% tuition tax on all college students going to college in the city. The rationale is that students going to college use public services and utilities and do not pay directly for them.

I can't wait until the legislature in New York hears about this one. Imagine your son or daughter going to the University of Buffalo and on to the cost of attendance of say $18,000 you now will have to pay a tax on top of that. It sounds like a new sales tax scheme. What if you are a need based student or received a scholarship; does that lower your cost and reduce the tax? How about an athlete on a full ride? Do they pay the sales tax on the total cost?

Here is how you kill the golden goose. There are 17 colleges and universities in the Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga, and Schenectady area. The reason I bring this area up is that our daughter has graduated from Skidmore College and our son is presently at RPI. The 17 schools have a combined annual budget of almost $2 billion. These 17 colleges educate almost 70,000 students annually.

About half of them come from outside the area which means that they are also spending outside dollars there. If each spends an additional $10,000 a year, that's another $350 million and that's not part of the 2 billion. So the combined economic impact to this one area is almost 5 billion dollars. I caution our legislature to go lightly here and do not institute a sales tax on higher education and force parents to go to a state that does not have the sales tax.

College is expensive enough. Adding a sales tax on to the cost of college will only hurt the middle class who are having a tough time paying for college right now.