… benddownments. As in bend down (I guess bend over would convey it better) and take it. We already have $32.3 billion, but you still have to pay almost $60,000 tuition and we’re going to dun you for huge donations for the rest of your life, even though
Student tuition at places like Harvard is now almost an afterthought. It runs on a budget of about $4.2 billion a year in spending. Tuition, fees, room and board at the full price of $58,607 for its 6,700 undergraduates would amount to $393 million, or less than 10 percent. And after taking need-based tuition reductions into account, the university collects only about half that projected total from undergrads. So for $200 million a year, Harvard could be totally free to all undergraduate students.
And does it sometimes run through your mind to wonder what just a few … afterthought expenditures from the tens of billions of dollars sitting in Harvard’s funds might do for the… uh… world? Well, shush. It’s all gonna be okay. You’re gonna grow up to be a hedge fund manager with the sort of ego that needs a biz school building at Harvard with your name on it much more than you need to help some obscure village full of suffering people. People who need schools or whatever. Relax.
August 10th, 2014 at 12:53PM
Harvard’s need-based aid is pretty generous. I fail to see the problem with charging the ultra-rich tuition to send their kids there. If it’s free for everyone, doesn’t that just encourage the rich to go to Harvard instead of Princeton and make it harder for regular people to get in? I’m sure someone’s done a study on this.
August 10th, 2014 at 1:19PM
Are there now any really large “non-profits” worthy of that name? Perhaps a few: none comes to mind. Sure: no equity owners, but oh those salaries, that power and prestige, distributed right to the top and to the top’s infrastructure.
August 10th, 2014 at 1:28PM
Afterthought: maybe end “own” ments. Perhaps they’re living beyond their ends.
August 10th, 2014 at 1:47PM
Greg: End “own” ments is good.
August 10th, 2014 at 2:57PM
Greg…”no equity owners, but oh those salaries, that power and prestige”..the way I put it is that “nonprofit” often means only that there are no pesky shareholders with whom the loot must be shared.
August 10th, 2014 at 3:11PM
Surely we should be concerned about the increasingly-dominant role that Harvard and similar institutions are playing in the selection of future elites. Do we really want our choice of political leaders, business leaders, researchers receiving major grants, etc, to be based largely on the preferences of Ivy League admissions officers?
Here’s Peter Drucker (Austrian, went to university in Germany), writing back in 1969:
“One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…
It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers. It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the engineer with a degree from North Idaho A. and M. is an engineer and not a draftsman. Yet this is the flexibility Europe needs in order to overcome the brain drain and to close the technology gap.”
American has come much closer to accepting the claim of Harvard Law School (for example) to have the social dominance of a Grande Ecole than it had when Drucker wrote the above.
August 10th, 2014 at 4:34PM
It’s unconscionable that Harvard charges its undergraduates any fees at all, but that’s only the start of it. The only way to really get at the structural unfairness of elite school entry would be to introduce admission by lot. Allow anyone who graduates in the top 5% of their high school cohort to apply, then put all the names in a big goldfish bowl and have Drew Faust (perhaps dressed in dungarees and a straw hat, chewing thoughtfully on a stalk of wheat) pull them out one at a time.
August 10th, 2014 at 4:36PM
Alan: Drew’s Draw!