Tax the Privately Educated

Chris Dillow wants to tax the privately educated more heavily. I think this is a great idea. And in fact it's not all that far from one idea which really has been taken seriously in the UK: a higher rate of income tax for university graduates. The UK department of education even put out a paper in 2003 entitled "Why not a Pure Graduate Tax?".

The losers in this kind of scheme would be private schools: middle-class parents, worried about imposing a larger-than-necessary tax burden on their children, would be more inclined to send their middle-class kids to state schools, thereby improving the quality of those state schools.

Areas with many private schools, pretty much by definition, tend to be wealthy areas. If all those wealthy parents sent their kids to the local state schools, those local state schools would be excellent. But because the wealthy parents send their kids to private schools instead, the local state schools often turn out in practice to be quite bad, which only increases the desire of parents to send their kids to private school.

This is an inefficient use of resources, especially when you consider that the parents sending their kids to private schools are already paying for their local public schools. It's slightly ridiculous that the likes of Harvard and Princeton are spend a huge amount of effort trying to prevent themselves from becoming rich-kid ghettoes, while their private counterparts among primary and secondary schools positively sell themselves on their rich-kid-ghetto credentials. Let's try to level the playing field earlier on, instead of waiting until those kids graduate from high school.