Comment by blackhawkC17
2 days ago
> They were given land and money specifically to serve the public good.
Their duty is to deliver education. It's not solving political problems meant for elected officials (and the population at large).
2 days ago
> They were given land and money specifically to serve the public good.
Their duty is to deliver education. It's not solving political problems meant for elected officials (and the population at large).
If their duty is to deliver education, why are they sitting on a $20B hoard?
Presumably they could spend a little bit of that to deliver some more education, couldn’t they?
In the short term, yes. Just like an orchard owner can chop down his trees and sell firewood to make a little more money this year.
Endowments are not just slush funds that can be used at leadership’s discretion; they are often from donated monies with specific stipulations set by donors on how, where, and what those funds can and cannot be spent on.
college endowments are invested. Managing these investments is a huge focus of universities
They spend $9 billion annually on exactly that. This "hoard" can, checks notes, fund barely two years of operations.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231...
Interestingly, according to the report in your link, UPenn pays over 3 billion dollars in salaries, but it has around 1,400 faculty for ~10,000 students. This means that either the instructors are fabulously well paid, or that the vast majority of money is going somewhere else. And indeed according to [0] just 4.64% of salaries are paid to instructional staff, with 23.9% or 2078 of paid employees being management staff. So if I am reading this correctly, they have far more administrators than actual academics, which is rather incredible. Incidentally, according to the same link the median percentage of salaries paid to instructional staff is 30% for similar doctoral universities.
[0] https://datausa.io/profile/university/university-of-pennsylv...
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there are many, many people who are paid a lot of money to pretend to believe that the universities should actually be spending less and keeping more for their endowments because that strategy would enable the biggest impact at some indeterminate point in the future