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A greater tax deduction for students is not a handout. On the contrary, it helps those who are willing to meet the challenges of higher education to invest in our collective future.

My charitable donations go to educational efforts, such as Teach for America, Vanderbilt University, Berkshire School.

As more government functions are privatized, we find political leaders defunding the public school system, shifting government funds to the private, for-profit school industry.

Such schemes take money from people who can least afford to spend it to support an unneeded bureaucracy that eats money people thought they were providing for education.

Obviously, a lot of non-profits live on donations, and that's a wonderful thing. But higher education can't exist on donations only because, if that were the case, we would have a hard time paying teachers adequate salaries.

We build schools and give government loans and grants to college kids; for those of us who are parents, tuition will often be the last big subsidy we give the children we've raised.

American tax dollars spent on education are meant to support students, not support aggressive, deceptive, and misleading marketing campaigns by certain for-profit education companies.

Philanthropists today want input into how their monies are being deployed. The big question is, can governments use this insight to sell the rich the idea of paying more tax rather than spend more on charitable giving?

Taxation is not charity. It is not voluntary. As we shrink the state and make government smaller, we will find that more and more people are able to take care of themselves.

The goal of the program, called Giving With Purpose, is to teach college students - and anyone else who cares to register - how to beneficially contribute to charity. That's not necessarily easy. There are IRS rules for giving that must be learned, and there is wayward, wasteful philanthropy to be avoided.