Cmon NIT, you're smarter this and you fell right into their trap. Yea, for the students already there that are in state, they get to pay the same amount next year. No doubt. But all Penn State has to do is admit an ever increasing percentage of out of state kids (which they are doing!), and boom! Now you've just raised tuition without raising tuition. Barry is 100% right on this.
It's like the idiots that live around me and every year the property taxes go up.. And they say, surely we have to keep paying these increases because good schools drive the property values... They're putting the egg before the chicken. The schools are actually good BECAUSE of the property values, not the other way around.
You’re wrong, and I am smarter than that. It’s simple math. They are not raising tuition for in state students. That’s the important point. Zero increase for Pennsylvanians. Why should we care what out of state students are charged? Those higher tuition payments help to keep the tuition frozen for in state students. Let those out of state parents (30% of PSU’s student enrollment are out of state students) subsidize the parents of the Pa. kids. They are the beneficiaries. It’s just like the private universities who take some of the $60,000 they collect from the wealthy students and use some of it to provide scholarships to the students from lower income families. Those who pay more subsidize those who therefore pay less.
Your statement about quality of schools and property values is a superficial generalization. There are a lot of factors, including parental involvement, stable family units, health and nutrition of the students, cultural differences, ethnicity, the educational level of the parents, and the quality of teachers which contribute to the quality of the education, and many factors do correlate to the economic strata of the student. But good schools do increase the demand for homes within those high performing school districts resulting in higher property values. Families want to live where their kids are likely to get the best education, and will pay more for homes in those school districts.
There have been demonstration projects which place high performing teachers in low performing schools. These top rated teachers (in DC for example) were given added compensation to go into the worst schools in the city, usually in the poorest slum areas, to replace the other teachers. The results were that the students achieved greater academic success than they had heretofore been able to achieve. Those students in the same schools that were taught by the other teachers performed poorer (treatment group vs control group). These were the neighborhoods with the lowest property values in the city.
The point is that if a school district has the money to hire the best teachers, it makes a measurable difference and the data will support that. Great teachers do a better job than average teachers ( or worse ), and they can commnd higher salaries for their services just like in other occupations in the labor market.
There are also communities in large “high end” retirement areas which have crummy schools because the old residents constantly defeat schools tax budget issues. So the property values are high because the elderly like the low taxes there and that increases the demand for homes within these retirement communities among the elderly, but the school districts which encompass them suffer immensely.
