The endowment exemption costs $13 billion yearly through a Treasury reporting gap.

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

• XREF: The Treasury-doesn’t-count-institutional-losses echo parallels the IRS-doesn’t-publish-by-race hole that structures the whole book.
• QUESTION: Is the claim that the Treasury undercounts $13 billion because individual but not institutional losses are projected verifiable independently?