@IzzoOne : Not sure that I agree with your conclusion that UT-Austin has an $18 billion dollar endowment.
Aren’t the figures that you cite fluid among the universities in the UT system ? Meaning that as needs of a particular university within the system change, that its share of the endowment income can increase temporarily ?
Equating percentage of endowment income allotted to UT-Austin doesn’t mean that it is a permanent allotment or that UT-Austin therefore has a particular percentage of the underlying endowment principle / fund. While UT-Austin “can get more”. so can the other universities within the UT system, just as UT-Austin could get less.
@Publisher The way I was trying to describe it is actually along the lines of what you said. You can think of it this way. There is $4B or so that belongs to UT Austin outside of the PUF and there is no other claim to it. Then there is the PUF. By long standing law and guidelines, the University of Texas gets 2/3rds of it and UT Austin gets no less than 45% of that 2/3rds to support operations. Of the remaining amount in the PUF (maximum 55%) part of it goes to system administration and the rest goes to support bonds for capital projects. UT Austin also gets a share of the bonds for capital projects. I was just trying to quantify the part of the PUF UT Austin benefits from.
The legislature could conceivably change any part of the arrangement (the 2/3rds to University of Texas or the 45% reserved for UT Austin) or even take away the 2.1 million acres that generates the PUF. Other schools have wanted in on it, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed since it was originated 90 years ago. The part that has been more fluid has not been the 45%, it has been the rest. The System spent more for a few years buying and then ultimately selling property. UT Austin sometimes gets more than 45% and has been recently while launching a medical school. As the system grows, the allocations to support bonds changes.
UT Austin doesn’t like to bring attention to it for a number of reasons. If legislators think they already have enough money from oil, they will appropriate less or think they should lower tuition. Donors may not think they need to give, and other systems like University of Houston might make a play for it.
So it is unique, but perhaps less unique than you might think. Universities with large hospital systems have in a number of cases accumulated large operating surpluses that are kept as “quasi endowments”. Over time, the universities start to include these in their endowment totals and use for other purposes. These can be billions of dollars that actually originated from patient care rather than donor gifts. This arrangement could also be changed by federal law or state legislatures.