Why are taxpayers made to own or pay for government colleges and universities they do not attend? The only plausible explanation is that government-owned colleges somehow meet the needs of people in ways that private colleges do not.
There is scant support for such a proposition.
In fact, governmental support for higher education has actually backfired on its intended beneficiaries (if providing higher education to the poor is the intention).
“Frequently it will actually be the better-off who succeed in having themselves subsidized by the worse-off. Consider, for example, the almost universal practice of offering a ‘free’ university education, whereby the working class, whose children rarely attend universities, pay through taxation for the education of middle-class children!” Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God that Failed (2002, p. 97.))
A 2003 study showed that the most underrepresented group of Americans at the nation’s top universities is low-income Americans. Only 3% of freshmen at the top 146 most selective colleges came from the bottom quarter of U.S. households by income. Only 10% come from the bottom half (Anthony Carnevale of Educational Testing Service 2003//).
