Letters to the Editor
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‘Officials May Move To End “Tuition Roulette”‘
One has to marvel at the gall of officials of the State University of New York and City University of New York likening other multi-year, institutionalized tuition hikes to “a dangerous game of ‘tuition roulette'” [New York, “Officials May Move To End ‘Tuition Roulette,'” November 29, 2007].
Dangerous? To whom? With such hikes foreordained and fobbed off on the public as a prudent and rational plan for financing campuses, students will face endless tuition increases — increases designed to cover the endlessly rising costs that are the direct result of managerial inefficiencies. This scheme will of course inflict the most damage on students least able to afford higher education.
In the long run, phony “fixes” such as this one, which sanctimoniously enshrine rising costs, are also dangerous for the residents of the state, which faces a $4 billion-plus budget gap, and from which productive taxpayers are fleeing in droves. Institutionalizing tuition hikes implies that campus leaders are helpless in the face of spending, and that both costs and tuition can only increase.
Such policies serve as a sort of deus ex machina that greases the way for trustees, administrators, and politicians to abdicate their fiduciary responsibility for controlling, and even lowering, tuition by systematically and structurally controlling costs, all the while strengthening academic quality.
CANDACE de RUSSY
Former SUNY Trustee
Bronxville, N.Y.
‘The Frozen City’
Property owners have a moral right — and should have the legal right — to set the price for the rent of their property without interference by the state [Oped, “The Frozen City,” December 3, 2007].
The role of the state should be to protect the rights of landlords to reach voluntary agreements with tenants for mutual benefit. The government has no business determining what a “fair” rent is and forcing it on property owners.
Rent controls have no place in a free society that respects individual rights.
DAVID HOLCBERG
Ayn Rand Institute
Irvine, Calif.
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