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‘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.

Margaret Soltan, January 4, 2024 6:40PM
Posted in: harvard: foreign and domestic policy

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2 Responses to “‘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.’”

  1. Mondo Says:

    I prefer to think of it as 2500x my employer’s endowment. Call it 2.5 kiloNewberries.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Mondo – LOL.

    All the Claudine Gay attention has gotten a lot of people to look at that unconscionable endowment. Maybe something will change.

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