I think you're mixing an opinion on high taxation in general (which you might be right about), versus how big metropolises enjoy labor that was raised somewhere else.
Isn't the company that's hiring the graduate just as much a beneficiary for instance?
What does matter? My taxes, as parent. I pay soooo much taxes and I will continue to do so. As a result my kid is essentially forced to go to a college in state. And he will then FOR SURE move out of state. But I won’t.
So. It’s a cost to me. Like we are considering moving back to CA to get the UC discount. I will pay more in taxes but I’ll get a chunk of it back in tuition break.
"Go to State" is a recommendation from the elders. If the parents poo-poo State the kid won't consider it seriously.
But RTO is still contentious, and the ability to find a job if I moved to vaguely-near-Boise would be terrible. One misstep at work, or even just another economic shift, and I'm moving again.
But I'd love to be in a smaller city. Annapolis MD, or coastal WA or deep mountains MT, whatever.
And I know several parents who tried the "go it alone" method for a while, but eventually decided to move back to one of their hometowns, specifically to be closer to their parents for reasons related to their kids. Most of it seems to be a mix of wanting nearby, reliable childcare, as well as just wanting their kids to grow up with regular contact with their grandparents. (I've also seen the phenomenon where the grandparents, after retirement, end up moving to the parents' location, but often that requires the grandparents to move to a higher cost-of-living area, so I expect that happens less often.)
I don't plan to have kids, so this is certainly a grain-of-salt-worthy opinion, but it feels to me that parent-marriages would be on average healthier if the parents had easier childcare options so they can more often do "date night" type things. Certainly nearby grandparents is not the only way to achieve that, but it is one of the simplest options, assuming grandparents who are happy to be involved to that degree.
First, the states with the big cities they moved to also have smaller towns outside those cities that are fine for families. They can move to one of those and still have sufficient contact with the city to maintain their career.
Second, their spouse likely is not from the same state they are from, and may not want to move to that state. And they may not want to move to where the spouse is from.
A possibility is a great affordability ratio - cheap housing as compared to the prevailing local wage.
Remember, inertia to stay where you you are from is strong, you just have to help it along
WV ain't got that tho -- Pitt is at least a real city, and it's mostly filling in after the collapse of industry.
If you don't, you will only concentrate all kinds of problems on your largest cities, and even invent some wild new problem because cities can not survive all by themselves.
That said, a tax based on what city you happened to be born or identify with is the kind of weirdness that my culture can't assimilate. But it may make complete sense there (maybe because it's more traditionalist? do they want to be that traditionalist?).
There's no need to build another New York City when we already have New York City. It would be folly for the federal government to stand up a competitor to New York City.
But! It's not folly for Illinois or California to try. Competition is good.
they're not that bad, but they're not everyone's cup of tea.
But I really didn't like the culture, the roads, the housing, the way people drove. I'm just not suited for east coast life.
These cities aren’t competing on crowded, dirty public transit. They’re not prioritizing “walkability” (i.e walking through human feces and crowds of homeless people). I could definitely see the population of say, the combined TX metros overtaking NYC. Heck FL recently surpassed the population of New York state for the first time in history, not many seemed to notice. They’re not competing, they’re winning.
Neither the state collectively, non-parent residents of the state, nor the in-state parents get any future economic reward for funding higher education if the student leaves the state, so reducing the state's costs in that regard seems rational.
But that reduction in funding was part of the rise of the student loan industry, which subsequently seems to have completely deranged higher education funding.
A longer answer is that I suspect it's a bad idea in the long term. For one thing, I don't see how you wouldn't have "students who are disadvantaged for being born in the wrong state".
That seems to presuppose that the students don't benefit from the education and/or there's no interstate commerce.
I'll admit neglecting interstate commerce as a second order effect.
Part of the problem is that brain drain is a vicious cycle. Your home state is less attractive in part because of all the people in your field who left for "greener pastures".
And they have less funds to put into projects that might make the area more attractive, because they can't tax the people who left.
I'm not saying you owe anything out of your paycheck, but it is a problem. Both for the places being left and the overcrowded cities people are leaving to.
The customer was the in-state parent. Rest assured, they were taxed just fine.
The child, when it finishes college, should do whatever is best for the child.
If the kids are leaving the state, the problem is the state isn't attractive to the next generation. Not that the kid somehow skipped out on the state. Heck, the state had an inertial advantage over every other state and still couldn't keep the kid there.
Source: I grew up in Pennsylvania. Love the place. Left for greener pastures. Don't owe them anything out of my paychecks today. But my parents kicked into their coffers for decades and still do.