‘A correction was made on Jan. 4, 2024: An earlier version of this article misstated the size of Harvard’s endowment: It is $50 billion, not 500 million.’

An understandable error! Most people cannot comprehend/believe that one university’s endowment is over fifty billion dollars; and Harvard will be at one hundred billion before you know it, which will be that much harder to assimilate as a reality.

Even a New York Times opinion writer (plus, UD assumes, a bunch of editors who reviewed her column) finds herself rendering a reasonably large endowment as an amount in the hundreds of millions, rather than as an amount exceeding the GDP of 120 nations.

Here’s a simple trick to help you remember: Just repeat aloud ten times FIFTY BILL FIFTY BILL with a stress on the b.

‘[Harvard] could use some [of] the school’s $53 billion endowment to vastly reduce tuition, which is a barrier to many students. (By the way, how in the world do we permit an institution with that sort of accumulated wealth to declare itself a not-for-profit, tax-exempt entity?)’ 

A question we’ve asked for lo these many years on this blog.

‘The genuinely radical Ivy League option — spending their vast endowments to sharply increase student numbers — is unlikely to be entertained. The key to the Ivy League is exclusivity; a big expansion in intake would dilute that premium. We are thus likely to continue with a situation in which universities such as Harvard, with a $53bn endowment, or Princeton with $36bn, continue to get richer. Each of these fortunes could revolutionise financial aid at dozens of public universities.’

The second most radical option would be for the Ivy League to abolish what is called “ALDC” — athletics, legacy, dean’s list and children of faculty and staff. Forty-three per cent of Harvard’s intake come from one of these groups. The first, athletics, includes sports that can only be learned by the privileged, such as lacrosse, sailing and rowing. The generous athletics intake by universities is why so many recent admission corruption scandals, such as the FBI’s Varsity Blues sting operation, involved athletics directors. Contrary to popular opinion, most athletics scholars are not black basketball players. Sixty-five per cent are white. 

This is in the Financial Times, all of whose readers, one assumes, passionately disagree with these options.

And then there’s the author, Edward Luce himself!

When you’re staring straight in the face at, say, a BILLION dollar reduction in your endowment, you need to take action.

Harvard’s goal of a one hundred billion dollar endowment is in serious jeopardy this morning, as outside pressure on the Kennedy School threatens to alienate donors. The school denied a fellowship to a distinguished human rights advocate for fear that his critical remarks about Israel would offend Jewish benefactors, which would in turn significantly set back the Hundred Bill. for Harvard! campaign. But free speech advocates are fighting back in defense of the controversial candidate for the fellowship.

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Lord knows why anyone is critical of Israel.

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Harvard’s response to the controversy has been quick. “We’re already well on our way to 55 billion,” commented Gerald Symington, head of the HBH campaign, “and doubling that is far from an impossible dream. Imagine what just one school with a modest enrollment could do with that sort of money! We can’t afford to let Israel critics derail us from our dream.”

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Oh, okayyyyy…. We’ll give him the fellowship after all. But he better watch his mouth!

‘Oberlin has [fewer] than 3,000 students enrolled and an endowment of nearly $900 million; the research-intensive Canadian university where I teach, McMaster, has more than 30,000 students enrolled and in 2017 its endowment was about $704.7 million. The U.S. dollar is worth about C$1.30, so that means Oberlin’s endowment has more than USD$300 million than McMaster’s…’

But that was 2019. Little Oberlin’s endowment currently stands at $1.09 billion.

A few years ago, Oberlin College did a hell of a lot of damage to a local bakery – falsely accused it of racism, got tons of people to boycott it – and a jury’s decision that it pay the bakery $33 million in compensation doesn’t sit at all well with the school. But the decision has been upheld; the school’s only option at this point is to kick things up to the Ohio Supreme Court… or hey, maybe the US Supreme Court would like to air, for the nation and the world, a billion dollar school’s vicious attack on a local small business.

Let’s wait and see what Oberlin decides to do. Not paying will expose it to yet further penalties, one assumes; so it can’t do nothing forever. I’m figuring an Ohio court at any level will share the outrage of an Ohio jury in regard to the arrant vileness of Oberlin’s behavior. I doubt the Supreme Court would look at the case. And, you know, Oberlin has enough money in its endowment to pay what it owes.

It’d be nice if they concluded something humane and useful for themselves as a result of all of this, but that ain’t gonna happen. Mob rule will prevail.

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UD thanks David.

I could fill this blog up with stories of obnoxious billionaires giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the Harvard Business School (Harvard endowment: $42 billion) to get their name on a building.

And indeed I have covered some of the most obnoxious; but let us consider more pleasant things. Curtis Institute, the school that educated the unearthly Yuja Wang, just got an anonymous $20 million donation.

Anonymous: How about that? And given so that the world can be more musical. How about that.

When your endowment struggles to break forty billion…

you can be forgiven for special admissions procedures for the children of big donors.

Harvard: Keep your $36 billion endowment close and your sexual harassers closer.

Harvard University: Famous for holding tight to its stupendous endowment, and just as famous for holding tight to its sexual harassers.

‘Last year, Harvard’s dining service workers went on strike for several weeks before the university agreed to a modest pay increase and affordable health care. The richest university in the country, with an endowment of over $37 billion, agreed to raise dining service workers’ salaries by 3.5 percent only after a 22-day union strike.’

How d’ya think we got so rich, whippersnapper?

‘[B]ut, you know, if you look at something like Harvard and Yale, they have an endowment of a combined $60 billion. I mean, that’s an astronomical amount of money. And, in effect, by it being tax free, aren’t we the taxpayer subsidizing these elite universities that are hardly hurting for income? I mean, aren’t we all paying for it?’

Silly girl. “[T]he American people get a great bargain with these endowments.”

“At Yale … the endowment … grew to $27 billion in the 2017 fiscal year. Harvard’s endowment …stood at $37 billion. The size of some of the endowments suggests that they could weather a 1.4 percent tax on earnings.”

Nah.

UD has never understood why the fact that some universities have amassed endowments of $25, $35 billion doesn’t appall many people.

It appalls her, and if you put endowment in her search engine, you’ll find years of UD being appalled.

These endowments are a classic rich-get-richer phenom, in which a hedgie, say, decides the best thing to do with his or her hundreds of millions of dollars is to give them to Harvard, so that Harvard’s endowment can go from $35 billion to $35 billion plus. To make matters worse, schools like Harvard hoard their endowments.

You don’t have to be Peter Singer to know that this is an unconscionable use of money.

Malcolm Gladwell has begun podcasting about how disgusting it is that “the biggest donations go to institutions that already have endowments larger than some countries’ gross domestic products.” Good.

“[S]tudent tuition is increasing at a steady clip on average more than the rate increase of operating expenses, all while Yale’s endowment is seeing huge gains.”

Yale University: Eat the Rich.

“We’re … subsidizing wealthy organizations sitting in the middle of poor towns. Yale University has an endowment of about $25 billion, yet it pays very little to the city of New Haven, which I (as a resident) can assure you needs the money. At the prep school I attended (current endowment: $175 million), faculty houses, owned by the school, were tax-exempt, on the theory that teachers sometimes had students over for dinner, where they talked about history or literature or swim practice.”

And there’s more.

Conservatives are footing the bill for taxes that Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit, doesn’t pay — while liberals are making up revenue lost from the National Rifle Association. I could go on. In short, the exemption-and-deduction regime has grown into a pointless, incoherent agglomeration of nonsensical loopholes, which can allow rich organizations to horde plentiful assets in the midst of poverty.

Readers who’d like to (re)visit UD‘s long-running amazement that Harvard University, sitting on close to 36.4 billion dollars (No, that’s silly. That’s crazy. “[W]hen it comes to these fancy universities the official endowment figures are a drastic understatement of the real wealth of the university. Harvard’s real-estate assets are mind-bogglingly valuable, for example, but not part of the endowment.“), continues to enjoy non-profit benefits, can click on the category harvard: foreign and domestic policy. You’ll find it at the bottom of this post.

“Harvard University – a tax exempt organization – [has a] $36.4 billion endowment, a fund that grew – tax free – by 15% last year. Overall, Harvard reports about $36.4 billion in assets (even more than the NFL).”

And the NFL just gave up its tax exemption.

Just sayin’.

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