01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 19, 2005

Sen. Stephen Alves (D.-West Warwick) is pushing a scheme to slap a $100 tax per semester on full-time college students in Rhode Island. He sees it as a way to get an easy $10 million for the state's municipalities.

Mr. Alves, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, argued Thursday that it would be no big deal for students, since many of them already have to come up with an annual $40,000 to attend the private Brown University or Rhode Island School of Design. For the "vast majority," he said, "$100 over a four-month period is nothing." He said he sees many young people at the Providence bar McFadden's on a Thursday night and "the 10s, the 20s and the 100s fly."

What Mr. Alves doesn't see, apparently, are the many more parents who struggle to pay staggering tuitions and students who hold two jobs to make ends meet while they study. These parents and students should not be targeted as cash cows so that politicians can get more money for cities and towns.

Meanwhile, even attending public college in Rhode Island strains poorer students, as noted by Jack Warner, the state commissioner of higher education. A recent study gave the state's institutions of higher learning an F for affordability.

Now Senator Alves wants to make Rhode Island a national leader in taxing students to make higher education even less affordable!

If the senator is serious about property-tax relief, he should join efforts to reform the state's pension system and bring public-employee compensation more in line with that of most other states. But this would, of course, require him to confront some of the special interests that have helped put and keep him in power.

He and his colleagues should drop the idea of penalizing students for attending college in Rhode Island so that the cities and towns can keep funding remarkably generous public-union contracts. Education is the path to achievement; placing a tax on it would harm both students and the state -- the ultimate beneficiary of many of these students' learning.

Meanwhile, the colleges and universities in Rhode Island bring much money to the state, through spending by students, faculty, and staff that produces copious sales- and income-tax revenue, and through the businesses spawned by the educational institutions: from stores to research-and-development spin-off companies.

Senator Alves may be reached at (401) 828-4604 or 222-6655; his e-mail address is sen-alves [at] rilin.state.ri.us. You may find out who your own legislators are at www.sec.state.ri.us/elections/findyourofficials.