Colleges are nonprofit organizations. I have the same grumpy reaction as many others here about how the colleges have gone off the rails, but subjecting colleges to property taxes would lead very quickly to the same for private elementary and secondary schools, churches, museums, etc. The state will smash any and all civic institutions that provide at least the chance of maintaining an alternative public culture that extends beyond private homes.
The left likes to camouflage its hostility to the non-state sector by pointing to the most expensive private elementary and secondary schools as bastions of privilege. And some of them are very nice, with beautiful campuses and quirky old school traditions. But such schools are few in number.
The vast majority of private schools operate on a shoestring, generally at a substantially lower per-student cost than the local public schools. And they produce systematically better results. This makes them the object of fierce resentment. The left would love to suppress them. Open the door to property taxation, and the left will eliminate them very quickly.
I live in Washington DC. Per student funding for DC Public Schools now exceeds $30,000 per year. This is more than triple the tuition at most of the Catholic elementary and middle schools and double the cost of the typical Catholic high school. A very few private prep schools are higher, but not by much.
You are only taxing profits.
Private schools will be fine.
A better idea would be to get rid of property taxes for everybody else.
One concession I would make is that these non-profit institutions should be exempt from paying school taxes. But that’s also because I don’t think property taxes should be used to fund schools anyway.
OTOH, the left has turned the nonprofit sector into a tax-subsidized political activism bonanza. Except for true social service organizations (including churches) it ought to be eliminated.