Comment by chatmasta
9 days ago
I’m more asking about how the universities are spending the money (and which pile of money they’re spending).
The government could spend the equivalent of a university’s endowment many times over and nobody would notice. If it wants to spend more money on scientific research, great - but I’m questioning how effectively that can be used as leverage if the universities don’t really “need” it.
No one really answered your question. We talk about endowments as a single pot of money the school can do anything with, but that's not really the case. Much of the time the money has to be used for specific purposes, and it's setup in a way that it can be used for that specific purpose in perpetuity.
Need is also an interesting question. A lot of the money that has been cut off across the federal government was already allocated, but just not paid out yet. So people won a grant, built out a service around the grant, and then they are getting stiffed by the government. Suddenly having to find another source for those funds is not tenable even if the school has an endowment, and thus you see everything shutting down. The worst part of the whole thing is this will eventually cost the US more money because the government will likely lose most of these lawsuits but then it costs more to stand the machinery back up once the grants are paid.
What makes you think they don't need $400m in research grants? Where else is that funding going to come from?
They have an endowment but even columbia can not afford to finance half a billion dollars worth of research off the residuals from their investments.