How did Columbia end up so poor?

<p>Relative to its peers, I mean.</p>

<p>A $6 billion endowment sounds like a lot, but is a trifle compared to the resources of its principal competitors. We don't know the numbers post-meltdown, but before the recent financial collapse, Harvard had $36 billion; Yale had $23 billion; Princeton and Stanford each had around $17 billion.</p>

<p>You can't blame it on longevity -- Columbia is roughly as old as Yale and Princeton and over twice as old as Stanford.</p>

<p>You can't blame it on size -- with 24,000 students, Columbia is roughly as big as Harvard, twice as big as Yale and 3 times as big as Princeton.</p>

<p>And Columbia is located in New York City, which for most of the past 100+ years, has had the world's largest concentration of wealth.</p>

<p>Like its peers, Columbia has an amazing roster of alumni in all fields (including, obviously, our current President). Are they just cheapskates unwilling to support their alma mater, or has Columbia just been particularly incompetent in managing the largesse of their alumni corps?</p>

<p>What the hell happened? Are alumni just not as enthusiastic about their experience there?</p>

<p>yeah i was wondering about that too and found this:</p>

<p>Why is Columbia’s endowment so much less than that of our peer institutions?</p>

<p>Through much of the 20th century, Columbia’s assets were concentrated in Manhattan real estate, mostly in the land beneath Rockefeller Center, which was sold in 1985. The annual return on this property—fixed by long-term leases—provided a less competitive return than the managed investment portfolios of our peers.</p>

<p>The University also historically relied upon a small circle of donors for fundraising needs rather than cultivating a broad base of alumni. The Columbia College Fund, for example, started in 1953, years after other college funds (cf. Yale 1890, Harvard 1925); the first University-wide capital campaign was not realized until the 1980s.</p>

<p>Endowment-building is obviously a long-term process, but a concerted effort to build Columbia’s endowment today will help solidify the University’s future.</p>

<p>[Giving</a> to Columbia University: FAQs: Endowment](<a href=“http://giving.columbia.edu/faqs/endowment.html#endowment_income]Giving”>http://giving.columbia.edu/faqs/endowment.html#endowment_income)</p>

<p>Yeah, what they don’t tell you is that it was total financial mismanagement in the 70s and 80s that led to them having to sell that Rockefeller Center land, and for it they got $500MM - not nothing in 1985, but it would be worth easily ten times that now, if not more.</p>

<p>Basically, Columbia’s finances used to be much closer to its peer schools, but we had a few screw-ups in charge a few decades ago and we’re still playing catch-up as best we can. $6 Bn is still nothing to sneeze at, though, and Bollinger’s capital campaign for the manhattanville campus is probably a big help to that.</p>

<p>Slightly unrelated note, but I hear there are some issues in the financial aid department as well. Half the financial aid staff was fired this year because they did a poor job in making distribution assessments (this is what I heard from my F.A. advisor), and so there was a lot of money lost there.</p>

<p>

I actually have to say that this might be a contributing factor.
More students = more resources needed to be purchased/given to students = greater amount of money used.</p>

<p>Columbia may have ended up being “so poor,” but explain why peer institutions with comparable longevity, size, and alumni are slashing operation budgets during the recession whereas Columbia actually had room to increase spending? (<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/nyregion/16columbia.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/nyregion/16columbia.html&lt;/a&gt;) Albeit, it’s only by a fractional amount, and the school is still making large cutbacks, but maybe perhaps because Columbia’s endowment doesn’t compare to the likes of HYP, it can claim to be doing better off in this recession. </p>

<p>And according to the recent 6-page sensationalist article in Vanity Fair, perhaps Columbia is not as “completely ****ed” as Harvard is, what with their $36 billion endowment and all that just took a major hit that was larger than the whole of Columbia’s endowment. ([Nina</a> Munk on Hard Times at Harvard | vanityfair.com](<a href=“Nina Munk on Hard Times at Harvard | Vanity Fair”>Nina Munk on Hard Times at Harvard | Vanity Fair))</p>

<p>this is a weird post full with wild speculations.</p>

<p>i think that beyond what cowboydan posted, we all know about 1960s (both pre and especially post 68) were tough times for the uni. before that the uni has the largest endowment with harvard. the other story is how rapid endowments have grown since 1980 and a lot of this is ‘artificial’ value just as you would note pretty absurd rises in other assets. columbia didn’t catch onto that wave until the 90s and were not posting gains equal to its peers until the '00s. i think a lot of it has to do with fundamental differences in what colleges believed were teh importance of real estate (think of columbia as the mercantilist of today) and more illiquid assets. Harvard had an endowment of about $1B in 1981! Can you believe that? That’s the real story here for me.</p>

<p>and i was looking for where columbia writes this caveat on its endowment profile, but it notes that because real estate assets (which columbia continues to have a lot) are difficult to quantify (especially in new york) that the value used is often times more conservative than the actual value. columbia might want to say hey we are sitting on $10B in land, but if for some reason the bubble really breaks and nyc goes to pre-1985 prices (hell pre-1940 prices) then it would significantly overstate the actual value and possible put the investment portfolio in bankruptcy.</p>

<p>other folks that hold a lot of land in investments (yale for instance) note a similar problem in quantifying and also quantifying the loss. [Yale</a> Endowment Drops…How Much? : Columbia Journalism Review](<a href=“http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/yale_endowment_dropshow_much.php]Yale”>Yale Endowment Drops…How Much? - Columbia Journalism Review). </p>

<p>cdz - it makes sense to you, but that is not true. columbia’s budget annually is about even with most universities. and endowment payoff doesn’t increase just because you have more students, it usually stays constant regardless of size of school populations. it is inherently a management and giving question (that columbia has only recently begun to correct and has done a pretty good job catching up).</p>

<p>catbossa - that makes no sense whatsoever. i mean whatsoever. even if part of what you are saying is true, i know for sure no one in that office was fired (especially for not doing some job).</p>

<p>Put HYPS at their own level. When you compare Columbia’s money with other peers like Penn, Northwestern, Duke, UChicago, and Cornell it’s doing just fine.
At the state of this economy it’ll probably take a while before Columbia doubles its money and gets close to where Princeton and Stanford are today. By then P and S will have decent enough growth too and still have a decent lead.</p>

<p>It sounds like the answer is poor or unlucky management of the assets at key periods in the past.</p>

<p>What’s sad is that if you look at the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, a very large percentage made their fortunes in NYC real estate. How Columbia managed to sit on top of all these assets and grossly underperform, well …</p>

<p>Someone once told me that in some respects, Columbia has suffered financially for its relative lack of anti-semitism historically. Located in a city flooded with immigrant Jews a century ago, Columbia (and Penn) opened its doors a little wider than many of its competitor schools. Rich NY WASPS were horrified that Columbia was becoming a “Jewish school” and became much more likely to sent their kids to Princeton and Yale, who took a much tougher stance against the growing herds of talented Jewish aspirants. That’s why names like Vanderbilt and Carnegie and Sterling are much more likely to be on buildings at HYP than at Columbia. Of course, this is all ancient history now.</p>

<p>columbia fell into a period of academic disrepute (that might be too harsh a word) in the 1980’s, as admissiongreek noted. It’s really only in the past 20 years that columbia has really risen to academic prestige on the level of, say, princeton.</p>

<p>I was wondering this when I saw Duke’s endowment as well. I mean, Duke, Penn, and Columbia have comparable endowments, but compared to other peers… well… it’s kind of sad lol.</p>