Stanford brags that “it’s pretty ‘sweet’ to be connected with Stanford” thanks to the perks its professors and staff receive. Perhaps the sweetest perks Stanford and other elite universities provide are the multimillion-dollar tax-free housing and tuition stipends they lavish on faculty, staff and their children. They’re tax giveaways most Americans don’t get to enjoy, though they effectively cover the cost. It’s long past time to close these tax loopholes.
The exact benefits universities provide to staff and their children vary but are consistently extravagant. Schools such as Columbia pay a significant portion of K-12 private school tuition for professors and senior administrators, often covering about 50% of tuition costs—which can run upward of $65,000 a year at New York’s top private schools. …
The problem is that because these gifts are all exempt from income tax, taxpayers foot the bill.
And K-12 education is hardly the only university perk taxpayers cover. Columbia, Northwestern, Stanford, Penn and others offer tuition benefits for faculty children attending colleges of their choice, paying up to 50% of tuition bills. Some schools cap this assistance at their own tuition rates; others don’t. Princeton pays 100%. There is also generally no limit on the number of children who can qualify.
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