<p>^ as an owner of over 200 rental units, I can emphatically and categorically refute your entire statement. The whole premise of “investment real estate” is cash flow. And keep the conversation on topic. Property taxes. Employer MATCHING of FICA is not relevant.</p>
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<p>If this were true? employers would ask what your tax bracket is, before setting your salary.</p>
<p>^ I don’t have 200 units, but I own enough. Supply and demand dictate what I can charge for rent, not what the property taxes are or what my other expenses are or whether it cash-flows or not. I got half of my units from idiots who couldn’t manage the cash flow and lost their properties to the bank. They couldn’t raise rents high enough to cover expenses and still be able to rent the units. There’s nothing in my leases that let me directly pass through property taxes onto the tenants.</p>
<p>If your property taxes suddenly dropped to zero, are you reducing your tenants’ rent?</p>
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That’s the point - the employer doesn’t give a hoot what tax bracket I am in. They have a certain wage they are willing to pay for a certain job, the taxes are my problem. They don’t care if I pay 0% or 30%. Same with a tenant - there is a certain price they will pay to rent a unit, and they don’t care what the taxes are.</p>
<p>Maybe things work differently where you live.</p>
<p>I find it amusing that people think that trying to get in state tuition using the rules set up by the colleges or states would be somehow immoral.</p>
<p>Who gets in state tuition is based on state rules or rules set up by a particular university. Following these rules to take advantage of what is offered is simply smart … period! It has nothing to do with moral or immoral. </p>
<p>If we take advantage of deductions offered to us in the tax law, is that being immoral? To me, it is the same concept.</p>
<p>UMTC made the strategic decision to lower OOS tuition in order to enhance their national appeal and reputation. As simple as that really. It will be phased out in the future and go to a “normal” level.</p>
<p>^^ In many jurisdictions, OOS drivers do pay more in tolls because they do not have the local ‘Toll Tag’ or whatever they call it in that jurisdiction. While it is not really restricted to OOS, visitors will rarely have the tag and will have to pay more.</p>
<p>Bob is right in the majority of cases. There are exceptions and that is the fault of a messed up tax structure in many states, especially around the borders. I could never figure out how the state could tax you for work you do in another state (assuming you cross state lines for work) AND tax you when you work in that state and live somewhere else. (if you live in a state with no income tax and cross into a state to work that has it, you pay the tax; if you live in the income tax state and work in the no-tax state, you still pay your home state tax).</p>
<p>For most of us, the taxes we pay primarily go to the feds and to the state in which we reside. Those taxes to varying degrees contribute to the lower cost of attendance for in-state residents. At the end of the day, the real reason that the costs are so much higher is because they can get it. Basic economics. The demand is larger than the supply.</p>
<p>There is also an issue with the ‘cost’ to the school for educating someone. Granting a tuition scholarship costs the school almost nothing. If size of the admissions class was fixed, it may be a cost for lost tuition. However, if the normal entering class is ‘around’ 5000 freshmen and the school decides to give 200 full tuition scholarships, they can admit 5200 kids and still have the same income they would have had without the scholarships and very little if any increased cost. Class sizes go up about 4%, no one notices.</p>
<p>But the root of this thread is that someone is making money helping people violate the spirit, if not the letter of the law.</p>
<p>Lawyers have been doing that for centuries.</p>
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<p>Your analogy is a particularly poor one. To get from Washington to California, I very much need to travel through Oregon, whereas going OOS to college is merely a whim or desire. If you don’t like OOS fees, the simple solution is to choose not to pay them.</p>
<p>Obvious strategy: if you want to attend OOS school at reduced rates, plan ahead and move.</p>
<p>There’s many different tuition strategies being employed by State Us to fill seats and meet revenue budget. </p>
<p>Some State Us gets lots of dough from their state and enroll mostly in-staters, but also give a pretty good value price to the few OOS-ers they enroll. UNC Chapel Hill is a good example. UVA used to be like this. </p>
<p>Some charge very high prices to significant amounts of OOS-ers. Think Michigan or UVA or Penn State or UCLA here. But then some of those schools may have to give significant aid (i.e. discounts) off the high OOS sticker price to get kids to actually enroll. The tiered pricing and discounting is no less complicated than how airlines fill seats. </p>
<p>Out here in the West, for example, the Univ of Wyoming in Cheyenne (only 12 miles from the Colorado border) sets its OOS price low enough so that Colorado residents can go to Wyoming for less than the University of Colorado at Boulder and for just $200 more per year than Colorado State University. CSU prices itself mainly to attract Colorado in-staters – $18k. 85% in-state students at CSU. CU Boulder has a very high price for in-staters ($25+k) but a more reasonable price for OOS-ers ($48k plus decent financial aid). CU is 45% OOS with tons of kids from CA and TX – they target kids who can’t attend UT or UCLA in-state…</p>
<p>Some states (like CA) used to have loosey-goosey residency requirements back in the days of lush state funding. Now that the funding is less, they are tightening up on the rules. </p>
<p>It is a market. No morality involved at all. Especially since many state taxpayers today are providing much less tax revenue to their home state Us than they did in the past. CU Boulder gets 5% of its budget from the state, less than what it gets in private donations these days. The definition of what a “public” college is these days has changed a lot. Public/state Us are all over the map on this.</p>
<p>Indeed. At some publics, their state only funds a low single-digit percentage of the school’s budget. It’s really only history and politics that keep them from becoming private. PSU and UVa are in that situation. Maybe UMich as well. Though PSU (and Pitt and Temple) are already semi-private; more like Cornell’s contract colleges than pure publics.</p>
<p>In our current higher education system, each state considers its own public schools to be an asset whose primary purpose is to produce benefits for that state. The states invest in the schools, on a large initial basis and on a continuing basis. The investments are made regardless of whether the state has an income tax to raise the money.</p>
<p>Those benefits for the state include both research/knowledge (which is generally shared, or at least available, to everyone both inside and outside the state) and a population of educated citizens (which is not shared, for the most part). If they invest any money at all into their public schools, the states will want to see the benefits accrue primarily in state, as much as possible. </p>
<p>It’s not that you think the IS students deserve a break over OOS students just because they have been IS for a year; the tuition subsidy is not for the student’s benefit, it’s for the state’s benefit. It’s that you want to put your investment money (the IS subsidy) where it will most likely return the most benefits (IS students are far more likely to continue living and working in the same state after graduation; OOS students are far more likely to leave the state after graduation.) Consider a state like Texas, for example: no individual income tax, good university, but using LA for illustration purposes, advantage to IS students is some $12k per semester, $24k per year. Clearly, the state of Texas thinks it’s worth on the order of $100k to have someone living there get an education, and that has nothing to do with taxes (because they don’t tax individuals).</p>
<p>I would have no objection whatsoever to my state fully funding higher education, even if I never attended here and never had any dependents to attend our public schools. I would rather live in a community and population of people with educations; I think the benefits flow to everyone, lifelong, to have an educated population.</p>
<p>@FCCDAD:</p>
<p>However, if state funding is only 2% of a public university’s revenues (which I believe is the case for UVa and PSU, not UMich), how much do they expect from their investment?</p>
<p>I found UVA’s state approps are ~10% so the real question is what do they expect for their $145M? <a href=“http://www.virginia.edu/budget/Docs/2013-14%20Budget%20Summary.All%20Divisions.pdf”>http://www.virginia.edu/budget/Docs/2013-14%20Budget%20Summary.All%20Divisions.pdf</a>
I would say that having differentiated cost is reasonable (though UVA is one of the two public Us which meet need for all students so that makes a difference)</p>
<p>The other factor in the calculation is the % of oos students enrolled. As Michigan gives little to UMich, not only they ask for 3 times higher tuition for oos, they accept a lot more oos students (~40%) to make up the difference. Nevertheless, UMich also makes it easier for kids going to high school in Michigan. You only need to attend the 3 years of high school in Michigan to be eligible for in state tuition even without state residency. MSU may have even less stringent rule and my neighbor is eligible for in state tuition there but not UMich.</p>
<p>Erin’sDad:</p>
<p>Hmm, I remembered it to be close to 2%. Maybe that was during the financial crisis. Regardless, at some publics, state support is pretty low.</p>
<p>Low in-state tuition is a service provided by the state to its residents. A seat at the state U offered to a non-resident is a product sold on the market. That seems pretty simple to me. There’s nothing unfair about charging what the market will bear. In other words, with respect to non-residents, a state U is in the same position as a private U is.</p>
<p>@Hunt You’re missing my point. Low in-state tuition is not the service provided; producing educated citizens in the state is the product. Lower tuition for state residents is simply to increase production. The in state students aren’t the customers; the <em>state</em> is the customer, and the in state students (once they get their education) are the product the state is getting.</p>
<p>^ I am not sure I buy that as there is no obligation to stay in the same state after graduation… The state get nothing out of it as the student go wherever the job is.</p>
<p>Most students go “home” (wherever that may be) after graduating. Especially if the don’t have jobs lined up. What the state gets out of it is the graduates who remain in the state after graduating. This behavior is relatively predictable, even though the graduates are not obligated.</p>
<p>There are probably some schools in states that will consistently see a net loss - there are just not enough job opportunities in state, and the graduates have to follow the jobs - and other states will have enough jobs that people will migrate there from elsewhere. </p>
<p>But the tendency to stay in or return to your home state is, overall, very strong. </p>
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<p>That’s the beauty of it. The states have to fund very little, same as how they contribute little towards private colleges and businesses. </p>
<p>The states still get to reap the rewards of having an engine generating economic activity & tax revenue.</p>