Here is a story in The Fiscal Times that may sound a distant warning to wealthy universities. It raises a question that might sound repeatedly in the coming years: Since some private universities are so wealthy, why don’t they pay taxes? As the article notes, last year was a good year for endowments. Harvard’s climbed […]
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In a recent essay in The Atlantic, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus lament that most students have to take out college loans. They write: “At colleges lacking rich endowments, budgeting is based on turning a generation of young people into debtors.” While Hacker and Dreifus blame the universities for encouraging students to take on more […]
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In 2009, reeling from the shrinkage in its $32 billion endowment, Harvard moved to slash costs by cutting back on the cookies served at faculty meetings. Eliminating the cookies, we were told, saved $500 per meeting, thus raising the obvious question of whether the Harvard faculty was obtaining its pastries from the wholesaler who supplied […]
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It’s a constant skirmish between donors seeking to fund specific scholarly projects at universities and the universities’ administrators, who would typically like to see as much of that money as possible go to “unrestricted” uses–that is, whatever the administrators, not the donors, deem the best use of the funds. And nowadays, with universities’ endowment values falling during the […]
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Yale University has been scrambling to cut its expenditures by $350 million a year in order to deal with a 25 percent decline in the value of its endowment after the recent collapse of the financial markets: from a 2008 high of nearly $23 billion to less than $17 billion currently. Budget-cutting measures at Yale […]
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I once asked a pilot friend if he didn’t tire of the lumbering, leviathan commercial airliner he flew. He surprised me by saying that a 747 can handle like a Lamborghini if ever it needed to. A bit of that seems to be underway in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the new president of Dartmouth College, […]
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College investments dropped 23 percent in 2009, the most disastrous year since the National Association of College and University Business Officers began compiling investment statistics in 1971. Two observations can be made about NACUBO’s report, issued last week: One is: The richer the institution, the harder the fall, generally speaking. Harvard, the nation’s wealthiest university […]
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Most colleges and universities plan to tighten their belts during this recession year, what with shrunken endowments, curtailed donor gifts, and students and parents suddenly feeling too strapped to pay high tuition costs. Yet for a lucky few institutions—institutions with connections to members of Congress—this year will provide some unusual financial bonanzas, thanks to a […]
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By Harvey Silverglate With Kyle Smeallie Harvard University may be losing money like a hard-luck high-roller, but the Vegas tagline (what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas) certainly does not apply: what happens at Harvard reaches well beyond the Cambridge confines. For better or for worse, many schools follow in Harvard’s footsteps. What better place, […]
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A modified version of this piece appears today in the Washington Examiner Georgetown University, like many colleges and universities hit by the current economic downturn, is in what look like dismal financial straits. The value of Georgetown’s endowment shrank 25.5 percent last year, to $833 million, the annual deficit it has been running is estimated […]
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Many people think the colleges and universities are overreacting to the sharp drop in their endowments. Lynne Munson, former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is one of these critics. In a letter (subscription only) to the Chronicle of Higher Education, she argues that higher ed endowments haven’t lost much value if […]
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Harvard University, trying to trim its operating budget in the face of a projected 30 percent decline in the value of its endowment stemming from the current financial meltdown, announced its intention to cut 13 of the 27 janitors who service its medical school and an unspecified number of custodial workers elsewhere at Harvard residential […]
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The Boston Globe reports that Harvard alumni have written to President Faust asking that, given the recent drop in endowment value from $36.8 billion to $28.7 billion, the latest bonuses paid to the fund’s managers be returned. The five highest-paid executives earned between $3.4 and $6.9 million during the last fiscal year. Those aren’t especially […]
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Happy holidays to our readers. We’d encourage you to catch up on material from recent months: Wondering how to read College rankings? – When College Rankings Are A Marketing Ploy by Edward Fiske. About the collapse of endowments? Ivy-Covered Hedge Funds by Joe Malchow Looking for current arguments in the SAT debate? Downgrading SATs Makes […]
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Duke’s Endowment down 19%. Yale’s down 25%. More blows to the “Yale model” of investment. If you didn’t catch it, read more from Joe Malchow on the topic here.
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The nearly six-year-old lawsuit between the heirs of donors Charles and Marie Robertson and Princeton University over who controls the assets of the Robertson Foundation has been settled. Princeton has now acquired most of the Robertson Foundation’s endowment, enabling it to exercise control over the foundation’s assets, which amount to between $600 and $700 million, […]
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The details of the suit are not entirely clear from early reports, but the 6-year suit between the Robertson family and Princeton over the alleged misuse of their endowment has come to and end in a settlement. Princeton is providing $40 million to pay the legal fees of the Robertson family, establishing a $50 million […]
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Harvard’s Endowment has suffered a staggering eight billion dollar loss, or a loss of at least 22% in the last four months. That’s the worst endowment drop for Harvard in 40 years, and dwarfs most comparable recent plunges in University endowments. Read on. Given uniformly dolorous news in the financial sector, it’s encouraging to see […]
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Harvard president Drew Faust spoke at the ROTC commissioning ceremony, a controversial act on a campus where hostility to all things military is entrenched orthodoxy. The question hanging in the air was: will she tarnish a celebratory moment by taking the opportunity to denounce “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” or perhaps irritate the anti-military crowd by […]
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Now that the Senate finance committee has requested – the New York Times said “demanded” – that the nation’s wealthiest colleges and universities supply detailed information about their endowments and financial practices, it seems clear that college cost is emerging as a long-running, popular and bipartisan issue. The request/demand came in a stern but polite […]
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Antioch College, of fame for strident sexual interaction policies, and Abu-Jamal commencement speeches, has ceased to be. American colleges are not in the habit of disappearing, but then, there are few colleges anything quite like Antioch, as Peter Wood today notes in What Happened To Antioch? on the site today. In a universe of left-inclined […]
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