Students and Taxes

While the cost of a college education has climbed higher than ever, legislation to case the financial burden has come slowly. Last year an important concession in the income tax law eliminated an unreasonable limit on a student's earnings. This law brought a unique problem of students into perspective, without providing any unfair privileges. A recent and widely heralded bill proposed by Representative Abraham Multer of New York, however, interferes with the benefits from last year's law and gives extensive tax reductions in the wrong place.

The tax bill passed last July provided relief where it was most needed by encouraging students to earn all they can, without losing their status as "Dependent children." Parents must simply pay half their children's college and living expenses to claim dependency deductions on their tax bills. Thousands of students who formerly ended summer jobs in mid-August, so they would not exceed the $600 limit on dependent's earnings, now can work for the entire summer. The new tax law has encouraged industry instead of indolence, making possible increased student earnings, at little cost to the Treasury.

Multer's proposal, on the other hand, would cut deeply into Treasury revenue by allowing parents to deduct from taxable income the total college expenses of their children. The bill also would discourage the very industry that last year's law promotes. Few middleclass students would strain to help pay for college if their efforts only resulted in a smaller deduction for their parents. Not only would the bill make a student question the worth of working a few extra weeks in the summer; it would also encourage extravagance while attending college. Room rents, for example, are certainly a legitimate expense, and students would be more likely to choose expensive rooms if their parents could claim a high deduction.

Besides discouraging summer employment and increasing the temptation toward extravagance, Multer's bill wastes its largest tax benefits on wealth families. Because of the graduate income tax, a father with a $20,000 income who can easily afford to send his son to Harvard would save nearly seven hundred dollars under the Multer proposal. Yet a family whose income is $5,000 would probably have to scrape to send a son to Harvard, and would receive benefits only a fraction that large.

For a bill which would cut Treasury receipts so drastically, the Multer resolution strives for its aims with remarkable waste. Any measure which is designed to case the burden of attending college must be carefully planned and presented so it will not appear to represent a costly and special privilege for the nation's students.