Comment by dleary
1 day ago
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?
1 day ago
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...
Thanks. Had not actually looked at the numbers of Philly that in depth. Unfortunately, has personally started to be such cynicism it's often expected there's usually a massively lopsided overhead of administrators with moderately paid academics and money that appears to vanish.
Harvard really did a number on my belief in American academia, and then finding out that students in Columbia were complaining they had to read made me not want to look at those types of statistics very often.
Anyways, appreciate the work of actually delving into the payscales, teacher / administrator ratios, and allocation of funding. Also, the https://datausa.io/ site's another interesting one to add to the list of public available dataset visualization, plotting, and summarization websites.
Actually, quick check from a different direction at least seems to support some of the Philly issues. Violent Crime rate per county on datausa.io: https://datausa.io/map?measure=E1cxD&groups%5B0%5D=24yFSi%7C...
Death by Homicide is also interesting lateral, although Mississippi apparently has a huge issue all over the state. Many 25+ / 100,000 areas: https://datausa.io/map?measure=ZfwdDB&groups%5B0%5D=24yFSi%7...
Unfortunately, website seems to trigger alot of Network Errors on the map portion of the site.
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