Posted on 01/24/2008 9:37:39 AM PST by Disturbin
My high school has a $700 million endowment for 1100 students
I am both an Aggie and an MIT alumnoid.
It’s traumatic.
Tenured professors don't come cheap.
Also neither do million dollar a year plus university presidents.
The several hundred million range is just keeping everything up and running. When you add in research and grants and stuff like that... They figure out a way to spend it.
A college football team is a hundred mil a year....
These guys at these schools also must contend that their endowments shrink too. You didn't read about that press release.
Sometimes they drop... like half.
I can tell you a lot about how these monies are managed and why it is the way it is.
They are not hurting for cash though...
Also you must realize that a substantial portion of their endowments are tied up into long term investments that are not always easily liquidated.
Like I said I can tell you a lot about how things work...
Man, talk about being conflicted!~!~!~!~!~!............
Many of the largest charaties also have huge endowments. Years ago, I heard that Boys Town was over 1/2 Billion.
Yet they are still able to issue tax-exempt bonds. Which is an implicit state and federal tax subsidy.
We subsidize so many industries with our taxes...
For one thing, tuition is automatically waived for families with a gross income below $60K/yr.
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/12.13/99-finaid.html
(At Stanford, from what I recall, there is no tuition if income is less than $45K/yr)
Thus one of the reasons for the downturn in our engineering education. Too many schools want to sell easy degrees to those who want a ticket in a field, not those who have a passion for it. Expensive lab equipment is required for the latter type.
This was the reason for a recent article condemning modern software engineering courses. They want to teach only easy languages like Java to appeal to everyone and fill courses where students basically build applications from existing pieces. The days of actually learning the hard nuts and bolts of programming are getting shorter.
Ugh, I can’t stand working with programmers who like to copy/paste code from apps you’ve created and/or grab everything open-source that they can find.
You'd lose. If anything they've increased. I am involved in the admissions process for MIT and keep in touch with people there.
If you're a Division I-A school, maybe. MIT is Division III, and that's only because there's no Division IV. When I went there they didn't even have a football team. They do now; in fact, they have a team in every NCAA sanctioned sport. And they've been given lots of money from their Alumni to upgrade their athletic facilities, too. I've toured them recently.
The Harvard ROTC and military recruiting issue was resolved when the Feds threatened to stop sending them money. I believe the amount at the time was 300 million taxpayer dollars per year.
Why?
Oy!
This scholl has almost as much d’oh as all of Alaska
“JANUARY 22 - The Alaska Permanent Fund lost a little ground in the second quarter of fiscal year 2008, with a total return of -0.5%, ahead of the benchmark return of -0.6%. This brought the Fund’s return to 2.0% for the fiscal year-to-date with a value of $38.9 billion on December 31, 2007”
Wow, nice comparsion.
If so, then kudos to MIT for doing so. They are "fer shur" bucking a gigantic trend.
Actually, Harvard still doesn't have ROTC on campus; Harvard students interested in ROTC register at MIT for it. They have Army, Navy and Air Force detachments, and accept students not only from MIT,but Harvard, Tufts, Wellesley and others.
Lot's of military/NSF grants used to pay for the equipment. Brass tags all over the place.
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