Free Republic

Single until your dying day? Want to be married for eternity beyond death? Perhaps you could contact a temple Mormon who could arrange a “matchmaker” religious temple ritual for you "for eternity." “Perhaps the most unique thing about our temple ordinances," wrote BYU professor Daniel H. Ludlow, “is that they can be performed for the dead…Such ordinances as…temple marriage are performed in our temples for the dead and the living. The ordinances for the dead are performed by proxy-a person living on this earth stands as a proxy and receives these ordinances ‘for and in behalf’ of the deceased person....

A man who Accuracy in Academia rarely sees eye-to-eye with nonetheless makes a good point in the October 8, 2010 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “As for costs, universities typically spend only one-third of their budgets on faculty salaries,” Cary Nelson of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) writes. “Despite more than 10 years of education after high school, most people standing in front of a college classroom earn less than $60,000 a year, considering that contingent faculty members, who are not eligible for tenure, make up two-thirds of the faculty work force.” “Most earn less than...

The last redoubt of concern for the common man is ridiculously awash in the cash that keeps eluding the object of its affections but then, maybe that’s where it comes from. The Almanac of Higher Education shows us that colleges and universities took in about a trillion dollars this year and spent roughly that amount. Most of these institutions have multi-million dollar endowments, even some community colleges. Most parents do not. Professors make about $100,000 a year with tenure while the untenured lecturers and associates range between $45-80,000 a year. Ironically, this is where most share-the- wealth schemes originate. The...

The nation's college and university endowments, struggling with declining gifts and massive investment losses, suffered their worst year since the Great Depression, sustaining an average loss of 18.7% in the year ending June 30, 2009, according to a new study. The study of 842 endowments by the National Association of College & University Business Officers (NACUBO) and the Commonfund Institute confirmed what many already knew—that the global economic crisis has taken a brutal toll. The vast majority of endowments will likely recover somewhat in 2009-10, as equity markets rebounded sharply in the latter half of last year. The Standard &...

The superstars at Harvard defied markets for years-- until now. Here's the inside story of how they finally tripped up.Stocks were tumbling last fall as the new school year began, but at Harvard University it was as if the boom had never ended. Workers were digging across the river from Harvard's Cambridge, Mass. home, the start of a grand expansion that was to eventually almost double the size of the university. Budgets were plump, and students from middle-class families were getting big tuition breaks under an ambitious new financial aid program. The lavish spending was made possible by the earnings...

Harvard may be the nation’s wealthiest university, but it is short on cash. The school relies on its endowment to generate a third of the money for its operations, and the endowment is on the verge of posting its biggest loss in 40 years. With much of its money tied up for the long term, it is scrambling to meet some obligations. Harvard has frozen salaries for faculty and nonunion staff members, and offered early retirement to 1,600 employees. The divinity school has warned it may not be able to cover tuition for all its students with need, the school...

Ivy-covered walls, Ph.D. economists, and growing demand for education seem to have, so far, offered colleges and universities at least a little protection from the recession and market meltdowns, according to several new analyses of colleges' financial health. University endowments, those big pools of "rainy day funds" that were designed to be so well diversified that they'd protect colleges during bad years, have fallen only about 25 percent in the past 18 months or so. While that has been painful for the colleges, it could have been worse. The U.S. stock market fell by more than 40 percent in the...

Some of the nation’s universities are trying to sell chunks of their portfolios privately as their endowments swoon with the markets, The New York Times’s Claire Cain Miller and Geraldine Fabrikant write. Among institutional investors, school endowments aggressively embraced private equity, real estate partnerships, venture capital, commodities, hedge funds and other so-called alternative investments over the last few years. Endowments with more than $1 billion in assets reported 35 percent of their holdings in these types of investments on average last year, a much greater portion than big public pension funds, for example. Now they are balking. The value of...

Washington is having a Willie Sutton moment. These occur when government, finding its revenue insufficient for its agenda, glimpses some money it does not control but would like to. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., recently convened a discussion of how colleges and universities should be spending their endowments. Grassley, who says more than 135 institutions each have endowments of more than $500 million, says perhaps they should be required to spend 5 percent of their endowments each year. Welch has introduced legislation to require that percentage be spent to reduce tuition and other student expenses. This...

Berea College, founded 150 years ago to educate freed slaves and “poor white mountaineers,” accepts only applicants from low-income families, and it charges no tuition. “You can literally come to Berea with nothing but what you can carry, and graduate debt free,” said Joseph P. Bagnoli Jr., the associate provost for enrollment management. “We call it the best education money can’t buy.” Actually, what buys that education is Berea’s $1.1 billion endowment, which puts the college among the nation’s wealthiest. But unlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls. Instead, it has...

Among the boilerplate views of his party that do not at all distinguish him from Hillary Clinton is Barack Obama's promise to create tax credits for the cost of higher education. Like most political candidates and all Democratic candidates I have heard, Obama has never gone after Big Education. Can't. Not in the party platform. He goes after Big Oil and Big Business and Big Health Care. Already down is Big Tobacco. Still to come is Big Fast Food and whatever else might be sued or regulated to bring about what is so euphemistically called social justice. I never hear...

The endowment, which has been run by David F. Swensen since 1988, outperformed all its competitors, according to preliminary data widely circulated among endowment offices. The Yale Endowment has had a 17.8 percent average annual return over the last decade, beating Harvard, its nearest rival in size, by 2.8 percentage points. During that 10-year period, Princeton came closest to Yale, with a 16.2 percent return. The second-best-performing school last year was Amherst College, which generated a 27.8 percent return, to raise its value to $1.7 billion. Generally the larger university endowments do better than the smaller ones, according to data...

The Philanthropist next door Couple pinches pennies to endow scholarships, make other contributions Sunday, July 24, 2005 KATHY KEMPNews staff writer You won't find his name on buildings or bridges or hospital wings. Not yet anyway. But Ron Howard, whose annual salary hovered around $55,000 when he retired in 1996, is leaving the kind of philanthropic legacy that typically comes from deeper pockets. He and his wife, Elizabeth, have their names on five $20,000 scholarship endowments that support education students at the University of Alabama, Ron's alma mater. At the University of Mississippi, where Elizabeth earned an education degree, they've...

<p>HAVING lost badly in the midterm elections, one would expect the Democrats to hone their appeal to middle America and go after the votes of moderates that they lost in a bid to regain the majority. Instead, the House Democrats seem intent on suicide by choosing Nancy Pelosi - a leftist - as their leader. How could they make a mistake like that?</p>