Nearly 50 college and university presidents are urging federal lawmakers to repeal the endowment tax that the Republican-controlled Congress passed last year.

Presidents from schools including Harvard University, Amherst College, MIT, and Wellesley College repeated their calls for a reconsideration of the 1.4 percent tax on their investment returns.

“This tax will not address the cost of college or student indebtedness, as some have tried to suggest,” according to the letter signed by 49 higher education leaders. “Instead, it will constrain the resources available to the very institutions that lead the nation in reducing, if not eliminating, the costs for low- and middle-income students, and will impede the efforts of other institutions striving to grow their endowments for this very purpose.”

The tax targeted many of the nation’s elite, private colleges, and Republican lawmakers argued that such institutions shouldn’t be getting tax breaks when they are sitting on a financial stockpile.