Endowment tax exemption alone costs the Treasury 13 billion a year.

Evidence

Sunlight must be cast on the revenue losses caused by the endowment exemptions, and the other tax breaks colleges and universities receive, such as exemptions from property taxes. (The Treasury, oddly, projects revenue losses for education tax breaks claimed by individuals but not institutions; estimates show that the endowment exemption alone results in $13 billion lost annually, and I suspect that number is low.) Such exemptions enable selective colleges to hoard resources, taking them away from their surrounding communities—and for many of the most selective colleges at the top of the pyramid, these communities often include largely black or brown neighborhoods with underfunded K–12 schools (underfunded, of course, because their neighbors, the colleges, do not pay property taxes). — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 338

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: The insight that non-profit property-tax exemptions starve adjacent school districts is essentially a local tax mechanic mirror of the book’s core ‘neutral provision, unequal impact’ structure.

Related

• The endowment exemption costs $13 billion yearly through a Treasury reporting gap. (similarity 0.96)
• Endowment-linked tax policy funnels greatest resources to mostly-white colleges (similarity 0.84)
• Endowment income tax exemption lets wealthy colleges compound untaxed savings (similarity 0.83)
• Nonprofit universities reap overlooked property and income tax exemptions on huge real estate holdings (similarity 0.81)
• A proposed endowment tax targets colleges holding over 750 million dollars. (similarity 0.79)
• For-profit colleges lack tax breaks and prey on black students (similarity 0.78)