From a Wall Street Journal Arcticle
The billion dollars in gifts that Harvard and Stanford brought in this year, is more than the total size of endowments of 90% of the colleges and universities in the US. And that’s not even including the $5-10 billion that their endowments appreciated this year. It’s obscene.
Probably never. 
They are mirroring society as a whole-they are the “1-percenters” of colleges/universities. I wonder if the top 1% of all universities (as measured by endowment $) have more than 50% of all endowment $ of all universities combined?
One thing that was pointed out to me is that a lot of these schools have medical schools and hospitals, and really some of these donations are for medical research and are being counted as university gifts. Whether that is disproportionately true for these schools on the top 10 list, I don’t know.
@spayurpets “One thing that was pointed out to me is that a lot of these schools have medical schools and hospitals, and really some of these donations are for medical research and are being counted as university gifts. Whether that is disproportionately true for these schools on the top 10 list, I don’t know.”
I believe the best Universities for Medical Research are Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and Penn, so that seem to support your comment.
Harvard is renaming its School of Public Health for the rich guy from Hong Kong hat gave it the $350 million. The only other named school at Harvard is the JFK School of Government. It’s pathetic to see Harvard go further and further down the money-is-everything path. I am a JFK School grad and won’t give it a dime, the school is embarking on a totally unnecessary expansion that is going to cost a fortune. Harvard just spent something like $40 million revamping its art museum - and then charges admission to it! And then we get subjected to pious editorials about income inequality from Harvard economists.
I would not hold your breath waiting for Harvard to stop fundraising. Their competitors won’t. Look at where Stanford was 50 years ago and where it is today. Who knows which respected regional university is the next Stanford? You won’t stay in first place if you coast while your peers are pedaling.
People who give to these universities do so voluntarily, so I don’t see the problem.
@hanna, I guess the question is what is the point of being number 1 in this arms race? Or put it another way, is there some harm to finishing second to Stanford? It’s not like they are going to able to provide an appreciably better education with another million dollars, whereas if that million dollars went to Bunker Hill Community College, I’d bet it would do a lot of good there. All these schools with 20 billion+ endowments just end up paying their administrators and money managers a huge amount of money to manage a growing pile of cash and whole bunch of new buildings.
Donating to a major research university which houses some of the most important labs in the country does a huge amount of societal good, particularly in an age where government funding for basic research has been stagnant or even declining. Places like Harvard, Stanford, and Emory are hugely beneficial to the area and world’s economy and innovations which took place in these universities have fed millions of people, treated truly awful disease, and fueled the information revolution. Personally if I were rich I’d much sooner give to a physics lab in MIT than to the physics department at nearby UMass Boston.
I’ll answer your question with another question:
Does Harvard want to be Harvard?
At one point in time, UChicago actually had the largest endowment in the country, and for the longest time, they believed in spending money to lure the best academics and students they can rather than hoarding it, while one of Harvard’s presidents was one of the first university presidents who believed in using fundraising campaigns in order to grow Harvard’s endowment (previously, universities started fundraising campaigns in order to build new buildings/libraries/etc.)
Now Harvard has the largest university endowment in the world and Harvard is Harvard, while the UofC (while very admired, especially in the academic world) is not Harvard.
Another example: Stanford and JHU are both research universities started about the same time that were based on the German research university model (so was the UofC, I believe Cornell, and several state land-grants). JHU actually pulls in more research money (by far) than any other university but Stanford lucked out by being located in the middle of Silicon Valley and had many alums become rich (and also had the foresight to commercialize innovations founded there). Now Stanford has an endowment that’s in the league of HYP. JHU’s endowment is nowhere close to the same size. How many people do you hear who speak of HYPSM? How many people do you hear who speak of HYPJM?
Harvard has the added problem of letting each separate school “eat what they kill” so the Business School has more money than they know what to do with. I have one friend who teaches ethics at the B-school and he has the cushiest life imaginable. He’s not allowed to raise any outside grant money because the B-school will fund all of his research through an annual research budget, no questions asked. He’s paid B-school scale salary (well over $200k per year for a philosopher!), and he has tenure. If you walk around the HBS campus, it’s like a glass-and-brick fantasy world with cafes, its own multimedia conference center, and a private car waiting area for executives to be whisked off to the airport after class. They didn’t want HBS students to have to work out next to common Harvard undergraduates, so they built a multi-million dollar 100,000 square foot health club exclusively for the B school students, even though the University sports facilities are literally right across the street. There is hardly any reasearch or educational component to this spending; it’s spending for spending’s sake. And yet I’m sure the Dean of HBS every year is comparing their fundraising and endowment against Wharton Kellogg, and Stanford like it’s some measure of educational success.
And just to show that I’m not just picking on Harvard, the entire Stanford campus is like the HBS campus. The first place the tour guides walk you past is the new $10 million health club, I kid you not. And this is in Palo Alto, a place where you can walk, run, bike outside in the sun 365 days of the year. I find it hard to see how these gigantic endowments and the cash they spin off are furthering the educational mission of these schools.
I don’t understand your objection. I don’t see why top schools shouldn’t have top facilities. Kellogg is majorly updating their facilities too.
@Pizzagirl
First of all, spending money on facilities is crowding out other worthwhile things like scholarships, research, and more teachers. And especially when you’re just goldplating your facilities it’s especially egregious. Second, it creates a really unhealthy competition between the rich schools and the less wealthy schools. Do we really want universities to play “keep up with the Joneses” when we’re talking about facilities? Third, this is one of the reasons that we can’t put a cap on tuition increases. Less wealthy schools have to build more dorm rooms and grow their endowment or else they will fall in the rankings, and it’s just a vicious cycle. And since I’m sure you’re going to ask, what business if it of ours? Well, since taxpayers are in some ways subsidizing what the schools are choosing to spend it it on, I think we have a right to object when it gets so far out of the educational mission.
Now, let me make clear, I have no problems with universities raising money and trying to carry out their mission, but at some point it becomes so out of proportion to what their educational mission is, I think we have to question (and donors should question) why they are actually doing it. Just think, with the $1 billion raised by Harvard last year, they could have paid for 20,000 students to attend Harvard. That’s insane.
It is wonderful that schools raise money for research and education. I am certain that this is the stated mission of virtually every major university. I find it hard to believe that gold-plated, obscenely decadent facilities fulfill any worthy goal. However, it’s their money. If that’s how the donors want it spent, it’s none of my business. Does anyone really believe that these schools truly care about the world anyway?
@purpletitan said:
But whether JHU is mentioned on an arbitrary list like that really is meaningless. Does that mean that Harvard or Stanford is affording a better education for its students than JHU or is doing better research than JHU because of all their money? No, not at all. They might be able to attract “better” students than JHU because they have better gym facilities and better football teams, but really, what has the money gotten them? (And based on location, Baltimore vs. Cambridge/Palo Alto, they probably would have gotten the student anyway.)
And why shouldn’t Harvard celebrate the fact that other schools have emerged that are its equal in providing an education. Have they lost out on a single thing because Stanford is suddenly unseating them from their centuries spot atop the college heap? Bragging rights are only good for bragging.
Harvard has is able use their funds to offer some of the best need-based FA available. I don’t see the problem here.
Pretty sure Harvard could just stop charging tuition and fundraising and fund itself entirely through return on endowment.