<p>the $6.5 billion includes almost all non-contractual giving to harvard by non-governmental entities, including grants from other non-profits like the mellon foundation. most of it wont be in the form of alumni giving, which typically totals ‘only’ $200 million (or so) a year.</p>
<p>bclintonk wrote: “But giving to a Harvard capital campaign takes a bigger slice out of secular giving”</p>
<p>you are making a huge, huge assumption that people don’t increase their pverall contributions when approached for a donation for a program like this.</p>
<p>There is a reason why the total charitable contributions increases year to year. Either more contribute and/or people contribute more.</p>
<p>almapater wrote: “Just out of curiosity, I calculated that Harvard’s $6.5 billion capital campaign works out to an average of $20,000 per living alumnus.”</p>
<p>remember that this is a 5 year program. So the numbers don’t seem that out of line.</p>
<p>Harvard claims 323,000 living alumni, of whom 271,000 live in the U.S. It awarded over 7,300 degrees last June, so that number is plausible. Of course, undergraduate degrees awarded represented less than a quarter of that. There are nowhere near 300,000 living alumni of Harvard College, with or without Radcliffe.</p>
<p>I believe that Harvard College alumni give more per capita, and a greater percentage of them give, than graduate-level alumni, but that gifts from graduate student alumni in total exceed the college alumni’s gifts.</p>
<p>Well, instead of speculating, see what you can dig up in the Fincancial Report. Link will take you to a summary in the Harvard Magazine and then you can go to the actual report. Enjoy number crunchers! [Harvard</a> 2012 annual financial report shows break-even year | Harvard Magazine](<a href=“http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/11/harvard-reports-break-even-financial-2012]Harvard”>http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/11/harvard-reports-break-even-financial-2012)</p>
<p>“I’d be interested to know how H comes up with its full-pay price tag”</p>
<p>The same way its competitors do: by looking left and right and moving in lockstep. I don’t know about the details, but that’s the big driving force.</p>
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<p>Yes, that would be my guess. No relation to actual costs or institutional needs, just based on exploiting the customer to the extent possible without looking too greedy.</p>
<p>I can understand a university charging $55K per year because it needs the $$ in order to survive. However, I think it borders on obscene when so much of America’s earned income goes to benefit universities that are already sitting on $billions in cash, just so they can build more impressive facilities that have nothing to do with actual learning.</p>
<p>Who needs a nanotechnology lab when everything that’s ever been invented has already been patented? Who needs facilities for composite materials research- people who have their legs blown off by a bomb can hobble around on a wooden leg- worked for grandpa. Who needs centers for interdisciplinary studies- people who know Farsi and Korean and worry about nuclear reactors can all congregate at the local Starbucks. Heck, the students can all live at home and commute- after all, kids in Boston and Cambridge and Belmont and Newton are pretty smart, why bother accepting smart kids from Seattle who are going to need dorms to live in?</p>
<p>What is your point, blossom? That $30billion isn’t enough to pay for those things?</p>
<p>My point is that we all think that sophisticated and impressive spending by universities is “wasteful” in the sense that they could be charging $5K per year in tuition instead of what they do charge.</p>
<p>But somehow, universities which were founded in the 1600’s to educate clergy and teach them enough Latin and history to be relevant for their time, have managed to “keep up”. That doesn’t come cheaply.</p>
<p>Anyone who doesn’t want to be part of the arms race can tell their kid to get an online degree. But my guess is that if your loved one had a rare auto-immune disorder, you’d prefer that they were part of a clinical trial at one of the Harvard teaching hospitals, and not my local community hospital. If you were a journalist and were unjustly jailed for failing to reveal a source, you’d prefer to have a constitutional expert from Harvard Law school on your legal team than just the guy down the street who did your will and the closing when you refinanced your mortgage.</p>
<p>Investments in infrastructure always seem wasteful and dumb and stupid; who in their right mind would want their kid to attend the Harvard of 1850 or the Yale of even 1900? Harvards and Yales maintain themselves NOT by maintenance, but by pushing. More disciplines, more faculty, more scholarship, more patents, more discovery, more preservation. Yes, fancy buildings are stupid. But the Computer Science Lab of my alma mater which was so cutting edge in 1975 when I arrived would be a joke today. The rare books library used a manual moisture/humidity system to preserve archival materials dating back to Colonial times.</p>
<p>It costs money to update this stuff. Lots of money.</p>
<p>Well, I’d be fine with the local state or private hospitals and docs. Nobody at Harvard is more advanced, and our home grown attorneys are excellent, as well. </p>
<p>But, I don’t care if these well endowed schools want to run as hedge funds. Eventually, just like with the non profit NFL and PGA, they will lose that status. Already, a part of why they offer such great financial aid to the upper middle class is the 5% rule. </p>
<p>But as long as the law is the way it is, play through.</p>
<p>Poet, I have a family member in a clinical trial at a Harvard hospital, and it’s the first time since diagnosis that a medical professional has offered anything other than, “This treatment probably won’t work but it’s the only thing we have”. I wouldn’t shlep to Boston to get my tonsils out, but if you were told you have an incurable disease… and a professor at Harvard thinks his team can offer a cure, would you really stay home and take a treatment which is no better than the placebo??? If so, Namaste.</p>
<p>I’m near duke and unc. So I’m sure you understand I’m serious but I know the difference. </p>
<p>Still, there are questionable elements to these nonprofits, and I know you know this too. </p>
<p>Either way, the best to you and your family! Truly.</p>
<p>To be clear- I’m not trying to make a distinction between the brainiacs at Harvard Med school and the Brainiacs at Duke and UNC. Cutting edge medicine being practiced all over the place at top academic facilities.</p>
<p>But you understand that the economics of a place like Duke and a community hospital are night and day.</p>
<p>Thanks for the hug.</p>
<p>Absolutely! </p>
<p>Reasonable minds can disagree in the abstract and the details, but I don’t think these capital campaigns benefit only Harvard, either.</p>
<p>“just based on exploiting the customer to the extent possible without looking too greedy.”</p>
<p>I don’t view charging a market standard as per se exploitation, especially where a hefty discount is guaranteed to a majority of families, and where the full price covers only a portion of the cost of the services provided. In Harvard’s case, we can be certain that 100% of full-pay students could have been awarded significant merit aid elsewhere if cost were a major factor. Also, the full-pay parents are a group of highly educated, successful professionals who’ve been around the financial block. It’s not easy to exploit that population.</p>
<p>The full-pay cost to attend college nowadays is a lot like the full-pay cost of getting healthcare. The expense can way exceed the value of the service received. Which means that someone or many are probably getting rich in the process. I am obviously not against the rich, but I think it is important as a society to decide whether the ultimate monetary recipient of our hard-earned income is the proper place to concentrate our limited money resources. We’ve been scrutinizing banks, corporations and CEOs, lately. Education and medicine should not be immune from the same scrutiny.</p>
<p>This is not directed solely at H, but H is the extreme when it comes to benefitting from and hoarding our $$. I have visited many college campuses over the years, and like many, I have been struck by the pristine excess and perfection I encountered at many of these places. Especially the ones located in the middle of depressed areas. It doesn’t seem right.</p>
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<p>Yes, we hear this over and over. But who is deciding on how much to spend on the services provided? Not the students.</p>
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<p>Except that your factual premise is flawed. Charitable giving has mostly hovered around 1% of GDP since the mid-1950s, fluctuating slightly up or down from that figure depending upon economic conditions. People give less during recessions, for understandable reasons, though that’s also when genuine charity (rather than funding fabulously wealthy tax-advantaged hedge funds) is probably most needed. Levels of charitable giving might also be influenced by tax policy, but that cuts both ways: high tax rates would leave less money in private hands to go to charity, but they also make the charitable tax deduction more valuable. Since 1954, charitable giving has never fallen below 0.9% of GDP (7 of the 9 years between 1975 and 1983) nor risen above 1.5% (in a single year, 2005, but it was at 1.4% in 2001, '02, '04, '06, and '07). In the recent recession, it fell sharply from 1.4% in 2007 to 1.2% in 2008 and 1.1% (of a sharply lower GDP, mind you) in 2009. </p>
<p>So no, charitable contributions don’t always increase, at least not relative to income. It is true that over time total charitable contributions have increased as our economy has grown with a larger population and larger GDP, and within that larger secular trend there have been upticks and downturns. But the long-term increase is not because of a ratcheting effect of institutions like Harvard asking for more money. A big splashy capital campaign will bring in some new donors and cause some donors to increase the total amount of their charitable giving, but it will also move a lot of money around from other charitable causes to the one raking in the most in donations.</p>
<p>“The full-pay cost to attend college nowadays is a lot like the full-pay cost of getting healthcare. The expense can way exceed the value of the service received.”</p>
<p>As I said, the type of people who are paying full freight at Harvard are tough to swindle. If someone’s trying to rip them off, they’re in a position to know, and also (unlike most seriously ill people) in a position to spend elsewhere.</p>
<p>If we’re talking about typical college parents, who may not be as well-informed or experienced and who are likely borrowing much of the cost even if their household income is $100k or less, I think they can be bamboozled into making bad financial decisions. But the people making $200k+ whose kids get into Harvard…for better or for worse, those are elite folks. Their judgment that this is a fair deal is powerful evidence that this is a fair deal (and maybe underpriced relative to what the market would bear).</p>