Rich kids should pay fees to attend public schools.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

91. The real problem, if we are talking about public colleges,

is that states have been systematically cutting their share of the funding for decades now. And I'm pretty sure that property taxes almost never go to funding secondary education, although there may be some states that do that. The education part of property taxes goes mainly to k-12 education, as I understand it. If I'm wrong, just let me know and I'm apologizing in advance for my ignorance.

That and the ludicrous costs of the football and basketball programs, and don't let anyone ever try to convince you that they somehow pay for themselves with alumni donations to the school. In fact, other than Princeton, the schools with the highest percentages of alumni giving are small liberal arts colleges.

In New Mexico, where the state lottery is intended to pay a substantial amount of tuition at the public universities, school administrators have simply raised tuition above and beyond the rate of inflation. Actually, almost every state has done the same (raising tuition far in excess of the rate of inflation) and it's not entirely clear why. Other than they can.

Several years ago I told my son that when I first started college (University of Arizona, fall of 1965) a summer job at minimum wage, provided you lived at home and saved most of the paycheck, would easily cover tuition and fees for the coming school year. Probably not room and board, but still. He round that incredibly difficult to believe. Granted, at the time the U of AZ was a relatively low cost school. We got a surprising number of students from New York State, because Arizona was a whole lot cheaper than any of the state schools there.

The overall paucity of funding for public education at all levels is disgraceful.