Yale Opens College In Singapore
As Yale opens its Singapore Campus, shouldn’t we all ask the question …... is this the beginning of the globalization of American Higher Education?
GE recently got a lot of bad press because it paid no American taxes. The reason for this was that GE IS NO LONGER AN AMERICAN COMPANY. GE is a global brand. Most of GE’s profits are not earned in the US. I suspect that most of GE’s production is global as well. “USA” is part of GE’s brand just as USA is part of the Coca Cola brand.
The consequences, good and bad, of globalizing GE are now well known. For investors, whether American or Libyan, this is good business. For American workers, not so much. Americans have to compete within GE for jobs just as much as the workers here have to compete with Korean workers for jobs at Samsung or with Italian workers for jobs at Chrysler .. a Fiat division.
- Where will the 2176 Harvard/Beijing :: Yale/Singapore game be played?
Is Yale American? The Ivies are even more American than GE. Just ask the Bush family. People “buying” a Yale (or UW) education come HERE for their educations. The nation is enriched not only by foreign student’s tuition but by the huge numbers of graduates who stay undergo the wonderful transition to becoming hyphenated Americans. American tax money is essential to feed this engine.
Without OUR investments in their research and their tax free endowments, Yale, UW, and Stanford would decay.
Why don’t America’s private schools pay taxes? The argument has been that Americans all benefit from Yale. That status, however, has also allowed Yale to build a very large endowment, capital that is not necessarily going to be used to benefit Yale’s homeland.
Who pays the bills in Singapore? One of the amazing facts about the American private Ivies is that they are in real sense public, if highly competitive , schools. Today, the actual cost of attending Princeton, for example, is far below the cost of attending the UW. This trick is turned because the tax free endowment at Princeton allows it to be very generous with its scholarship and aid funds. The same is true for Yale.
Will the American taxpayer now be subsidizing students at Yale-Singapore?