Yale on Sale

Yale University's announcement yesterday that it would reduce its college tuition costs for families earning up to $200,000 a year makes it the second Ivy League college in the past two months to do so. When Harvard made its move back in December, we wrote in an editorial, "Harvard's Middle Class," that the decision "puts into a fresh light the plans of the Democrats running for president to fund their spending programs by raising taxes on that same group of earners."

The same point can be made about Yale's plan. An example in Yale's announcement was a family earning $180,000 a year with $200,000 in assets. Yale used to charge those parents $38,150 a year. Under the new policy, those parents will only have to pay $23,050 a year.

Senators Clinton and Obama are running around promising to raise taxes on these families. The Democratic politicians label them as "rich." But Harvard and now Yale have just decided that those in these income categories are in need of significant relief from the costs of educating their children — costs, by the way, that even at the most expensive private universities are lower than the taxes imposed on most of these earners by the government. Yale's press release yesterday described these families not as rich but as "of limited or modest means." It is a step toward recognizing reality. One can only hope that word seeps out to the Democrats before they move ahead with their plans to sock these families of modest means with big tax increases.