<p>Just curious, mini - where does the $1.1B come from? Interim President Wagner’s letter posted on the Williams site yesterday implies $1.2+B ( [Williams</a> College :: Office of the President - Letters from the President and Trustees](<a href=“http://www.williams.edu/admin/president/letters/090701_herewego.php]Williams”>http://www.williams.edu/admin/president/letters/090701_herewego.php) ), and Ephblog has Morty quoting $1.4B ( [Endowment</a> Predictions : EphBlog](<a href=“http://www.ephblog.com/2009/07/01/endowment-predictions/]Endowment”>http://www.ephblog.com/2009/07/01/endowment-predictions/) ).</p>
<p>The $1.1 billion was last February. Sorry - that’s the last I saw. It’s still WAY more than they need. (And I told them so in declining to give them a penny for the Alumni Fund - they’ve got enough millionaires, and millionaires’ kids to be comfortable. And if they aren’t, they can just raise the price for them.</p>
<p>mini-</p>
<p>Please don’t discourage donors - my kid’s got three years to go!</p>
<p>They’ve got plenty of money.</p>
<p>Just as an aside though not related to the meat of this thread, but relevant I think, at the Community College I teach at our computer caps classes at 25. That includes intro to psych and all the infamous lecture classes. At our community college they are all seminar type classes.</p>
<p>A PhD is required to teach in my department. We have PhD’s from Yale, Columbia, Brown etc. No Harvards I think. </p>
<p>Mine thesis won best in US in '87. I say this to attest to the caliber of our faculty.</p>
<p>My S said the discussion in my mythology course was livelier than anything he has ever experienced at his elite LAC. (Same as mini’s.)</p>
<p>And I have heard nothing from any of his classes that doesn’t make me think I’m as talented a teacher as the best he has (as are my colleagues.) </p>
<p>We educate 22,000 day students with all small classes.</p>
<p>I teach capacity classes in intellectual history, Shakespeare, lit surveys, mythology, the same stuff of other colleges.</p>
<p>I would blush to teach a course like the one my D’s best friend took at Brown: “Creative Non-Fiction” all taught from Harper’s magazine. There is so much great non-fiction out there that to plan a course in this lazy way is atrocious. This same young man graduated with an English degree and had never heard of Kerouac. Maybe not our most celebrated writer, but significant as a point in cultural history, surely.</p>
<p>Why do I write this? To agree with mini. Bells and whistles don’t have much to do with essential education except perhaps in the case of facilities for lab sciences and astronomy.</p>
<p>And I agree about using the money to feed the hungry. And how about prison reform? We can eliminate most drug incarceration and educate those populations instead. A year in prison costs more than a year at Harvard.</p>
<p>I know. This was off-topic. Posted just for perspective.</p>
<p>Mythmom, I enjoyed your post, including the off-topics part.</p>
<p>"My S said the discussion in my mythology course was livelier than anything he has ever experienced at his elite LAC. (Same as mini’s.)</p>
<p>And I have heard nothing from any of his classes that doesn’t make me think I’m as talented a teacher as the best he has (as are my colleagues.)"</p>
<p>It was a long time ago, but I enjoyed my time teaching at a community college (where I was voted “best teacher”) far more than I did at UChicago. The students were more eager, had more real-world experience, and the very best of my students, while lacking formal skills (the lack of which I helped to alleviate), were usually brighter. </p>
<p>My techniques didn’t differ much, though it took a bit more energy to get my community college students to challenge accepted wisdom (with my UChicago students, that was often a hopeless task, but as likely to represent a failure of my teaching as a fault in the students.)</p>
<p>I don’t think your post is “off-topic” in the least. An endowment is only worth the purposes to which it is put.</p>
<p>Mythmom,</p>
<p>Sounds like an excellent CC - I think unusually so. I’m a local bureaucrat in the upstate hinterlands and have some knowledge of rural NY CC’s. Up here, no professor is required to have a terminal degree. I can just about guarantee we don’t have professors with any kind of degree from most (maybe all) of the schools you list. Many of the kids here have a hard time writing and don’t improve much even with the special programs the school has set up.</p>
<p>But it’s cheap and pretty popular for local students. There’s a wide range of abilities, but much poverty. I think the professors are kindly, interested people, but they are not offering classes equivalent to those my kids have had a their private colleges (my son’s at your son’s school) - not by a long shot.</p>
<p>I suppose the more populated areas will have CC’s with more impressive faculty and facilities; I’m just saying that for a lot of motivated, bright, rural kids (yes, there are some), the local CC may not be the best answer</p>
<p>Mythmom’s post and DadofB&G’s have good points. I was following this earlier set of posts and found them fascinating. It’s worth adding that California is now spending more on prisons than on higher education. I completely agree with Mythmom that there are some scandalously poor courses taught at some expensive schools. You can get a great education in the first two years of college at a community college. (Disclaimer: I taught years ago at a first rate community college.) </p>
<p>My Ivy-League bound DD got some great advice from an older student that I’d pass along as it’s relevant to the question of value on the dollar that appears in this thread. What do you think? Here it is-- that once a go-getter, highly qualified student is in a top-notch college or university, he or she should –</p>
<p>Avoid introductory courses wherever possible. Yes, many of them are good. But for most highly qualified students, they will be covering old ground.</p>
<p>Start looking right away for the nationally and internationally-recognized professors that will be their mentors in terms of providing supervised undergraduate research experiences, and will direct students towards significant post-undergraduate work.</p>
<p>Graduate as early as possible, as in three years.</p>
<p>These sorts of experiences, which generally aren’t possible in a community college, would come only from highly selective universities and LACs. What do you think of my D’s friend’s advice for getting value out of an undergrad college education?</p>
<p>I think for a highly motivated young woman (and some men) it’s good advice. For my successful but slightly ADD boy it would be disastrous advice.</p>
<p>It really depends why the student is in college.</p>
<p>My son is very old fashioned. He is in a liberal arts college to get an education and to find out where he is headed. He doesn’t know yet. The above advice would be way too much pressure for him.</p>
<p>My D (also at an Ivy) might have been able to handle it, but I think she would have found it high pressure as well.</p>
<p>And yes, we do have a wonderful community college. And I’ve had mini’s experience: I enjoyed my students there more than at Stony Brook (granted, not U Chicago) where I also teach.</p>
<p>They are not grades oriented like the university kids are. </p>
<p>I am glad so many of you found my post on topic.</p>
<p>I’m sure you’re teaching, at either of the two schools you are currently at, is much impacted by their respective endowments. (I know mine wasn’t.)</p>
<p>The valuation numbers posted by universities should be taken with a grain of salt due to the illiquid nature. Following Yales lead, many top schools and preps fell into a track of investing in timberland spun off from the big timber countries, through elegant broking by timber management companies such as landvest and UBG. The idea was that long term endowments should match the time frame of their endowment with the timeframe of the product growth. Trees grow at about 5% per year and can be harvested after 40 years. The brokers matched folks with land to folk with money, and garnered 20% commissions for thier efforts. </p>
<p>The trouble is that when you subtract logging costs, taxes, and management fees, the returns are flat (which is why the land value, before the brokers got involved was close to nil.) </p>
<p>And then Yale sold to Harvard which sold to Exeter which sold to the next guy with prices (and commissions) spinning higher with each sale. A classic bubble.</p>
<p>Now the endowments are stuck with vast illiquid assets for which they paid inflated prices. The markets has frozen so there is no bench mark for repricing, so they stay on the books are “valuable.”</p>
<p>Before the bubble good northern timber land went for $200 to $300/ acre. Endowments and TMOs were paying $3000 to $4500 per acre and it is now unsellable. If you look at an endowment’s asset list, deflate at least 90% of any timberland. It was a sucker play and they were caught.</p>
<p>toadstool, thanks for the post. Good information.</p>
<p>Mini, in post #53, is absolutely right about how teaching is impacted by endowments. </p>
<p>The large state institution where I teach had previously (ie pre bubble and meltdown) improved the size of its endowment. Now it’s involved in a battle with the legislature to avoid further cuts to faculty, staff, and services. </p>
<p>As I’m in the humanities, not an area with a lot of grant money, I spend a lot of time developing and teaching hybrid and online courses because 1) it’s somewhat cost-effective, after the development time figures in, and 2) online is where the competition is, and 3) online or hybrid what a lot of students want. Having track faculty teaching such hybrid/online is the main way to ensure that classes fill. Keeping the enrollment numbers growing without raising salaries or incurring additional costs is one way of the many ways that we need to work, in order to get and keep the attention of the state legislature, I guess. It’s about access, which is what the community colleges (Yes!) have done especially well at, in the past, and where state institutions work closely with community colleges. </p>
<p>I’ll expand on this and say that a large endowment should be used to provide better access for students but I’m a total naif when it comes to the business deals that toadstool and others have described on this thread that I don’t want to hijack…</p>
<p>toadstool makes a very good point. I think once the figures are announced the critical question is:
Has the University taken any steps to independently verify the values of these private investments?
I think the answer has been and will be that they do an internal valuation and yada ,yada,yada. In other words-no we are taking the word of the private equity firms and our managers who obviously have a very strong, vested interest in making the numbers look as rosy as possible.</p>