If Harvard has a 26 billion dollar endowment, why does it charge fees?

coureur · May 11, 2006, 7:32pm

This is incorrect. At my grad school, if a professor's grant doesn't get funded or renewed by the granting agency, his grad students will not get support. It's certainly not taken from the university's endowment. The endowment is not used for that purpose.

Furthermore, when you write a grant proposal, you specify how the funds are going to be spent. If you apply to say the NIH for funds to support some grad students or hire post-docs to do X,Y, and Z experiments, the government is going take a pretty dim view if instead you use the money for other purposes.

marite · May 11, 2006, 11:10pm

Sakky:

Thanks for the clarification about HBS. I gather that HBS Ph.D. students are treated the same way as GSAS Ph.D. students--which is as it should be. It is very possible that there are some children of billionnaires among the Ph.D. students, but admission committees are not supposed to know about that, and if they do, they're not supposed to take that into account.
In math, and I believe some science courses, undergraduates are allowed to serve as Course Assistants. They get paid for doing so. Obviously, this possibility is open only to the most advanced students (in terms of knowledge, not of class standing).

alice1 · May 13, 2006, 4:23am

Most of endowment at Harvard is restricted in some form. Harvard doesn't have a choice, even if it wants to just throw it away to students, it can't.

sakky · May 13, 2006, 5:44pm

[quote]
This is incorrect. At my grad school, if a professor's grant doesn't get funded or renewed by the granting agency, his grad students will not get support. It's certainly not taken from the university's endowment. The endowment is not used for that purpose.

[/quote]

This actually depends from school to school. Again, to use HBS as the example, all doctoral students are actually supported by HBS's general funding pool. Their fellowship money is never tied to a specific prof. In fact this is why so many business schools, not just HBS, but also Wharton, Stanford GSB, MIT Sloan, and others, can actually guarantee funding to all their students throughout their time in business school. In fact, business schools will sometimes tout this as a reason as to why their doctoral programs are actually preferable to standard engineering doctoral programs because the money is attached to the student, not to the prof. In fact, I know one guy who was admitted to PhD programs at both the MIT Sloan School and the MIT Engineering Systems Division, and chose Sloan. One of the reasons was that Sloan would guarantee him funding throughout his entire stay, whereas in ESD, he might have to fight for funding. Ironically, as a Sloan grad student, he ended up working with mostly ESD profs anyway (many Sloan profs have dual-appointments with ESD).

Furthermore, the point you have raised is simply another accounting trick. I'll give you an example. A prof has to fight for grant money. However, the prof will also take advantage of general university resources and investments in equipment and plant. If the university has more available resources, then that means that the prof can spend less money on those things and can therefore afford to spend more money on students. Hence, once again, the money is fungible.

I'll give you an example. I know one MIT computer science prof who shall remain nameless who constantly had to spend a lot of his grant money on special CS equipment to run his experiments. That left him with litle money left for grad students. But then MIT embarked on a project to vastly expand the computing capacity available at the school. As a result, the prof found that he no longer had to buy his own gear, as he could take advantage of the upgraded general MIT capacity. That gave him more money to take on more students, and that's exactly what he did. He ended up nearly doubling the number of graduate students he took on.

I agree that you have to specify what you are going to spend money on when you write your grants. But the point is, if a school chooses to use its endowment for capital expenditures, then that means that you can write your grants differently, taking the expanded resources of your school into account, which allows you to propose more spending on students and less on resources. Using this MIT prof as an example, he just wrote future grant proposals that had a lower component of computing capacity spending (in many cases, with no spending in this category), and more spending on students. Economists will recognize this as substituting labor for capital.

Hence, the point is, endowment money, grant money, and grad-student money is still highly fungible.

alice1 · May 13, 2006, 8:38pm

sakky-- I think your point is Specialty School dependent. Generally Business Schools provide guarenteed funding because they have endowment money kind of fixed income resources whereas Medical and Engineering schools provide funding through NSF or NIH which is brought to the school through professors and research staff.

sakky · May 14, 2006, 5:54am

I don't even think it's all that dependent on the specialty.

To wit, most doctoral students of any discipline will get guaranteed funding for at least 1-2 years while they are looking for a lab. That funding comes out of whatever general fund the department has. After all, if it's your first year as a doctoral student, then you are still taking coursework, and you have yet to determine who your advisors will be. I agree that once you've been there for several years, now your funding may become tied to grant money. But not in the beginning.

Furthermore, the rules can be very different for various students. For example, my brother was guaranteed, in writing, 3 years of full fellowship funding for his Geophysics Phd at Stanford. So whether that department was able to obtain grant money or not, the department was legally obligated to give him funding for those 3 years. Stanford didn't offer this to every geophysics doctoral student. They did that because he was considered a top choice, and it was basically something like a 'merit scholarship'. Many of the other geophysics students were offered only RA/TA deals. Not him. He got a guaranteed 3 years of fellowship.

But my larger point has nothing to do with that. My point is, many of Harvard's doctoral students are quite wealthy but are getting full rides anyway. This is especially true at HBS that tends to attract a lot of highly successful and wealthy people from industry (the average entering age of the HBS doctoral programs is 28, which is clearly significantly older than that of most other doctoral programs). You should see some of the cars that these HBS doctoral students are driving, and the clothes they wear. Hence, all this talk about how Harvard doesn't want to give money to people who don't need it or how Harvard wants to charge money to get people to appreciate their education just goes right out the window.

Hence, the point is, if Harvard wanted to waive tuition for all its undergrads, it could do it (just like Cooper Union does now). I'm not even talking about giving every undergrad a stipend. I'm just talking about waiving tuition, just like it currently waives tuition to its doctoral students. It's just that it doesn't WANT to do it. Heck, if HBS wanted to waive tuition for all its MBA students, it could clearly do it. (HBS's part of the Harvard endowment is far larger than that of any other B-school in the world). But HBS doesn't WANT to do that.

coureur · May 14, 2006, 11:26am

You are wrong again. Schools charge for overhead against the professors' grants for exactly those things you are talking about (facilities, equipment, etc). In fact it is a real sore point at some schools where the universities get very creative in thinking of overhead things to charge for and thereby grab more of the professors' grants. Stanford is notorious for charging high overhead and a number of professors have fled there to go to UCB, UCSF, and other schools over this point. But the point is that research grants are separate, restricted, controlled pots of money that are usually awarded by outside agencies to professors, not schools, to fund their research. That money is not "fungible" with the money in the financial aid fund or the endowment. The granting agency still has some strings attached to it.

marite · May 14, 2006, 11:53am

To add to Coureur's comments: HBS has its own fund-raising campaign and gets to keep its money. It is notorious for not allowing members of the Harvard community who are not members of HBS to use its facilities. The first university provost was an economist. He was not allowed to use the HBS swimming pool. 
GSAS full funding is based on a combination of university fellowships, outside fellowships (such as Mellon, FLAS, Fulbrights, etc...) teaching fellowships and research assistantships. So the university's actual contribution to this full funding package is much less than would appear on the surface. That is true of Harvard and most other universities.
Aside from the fact that, as Coureur points out, grants are not fungible, GSAS and College funds are not, either. Many donations to the College are not fungible and thus not available to support undergraduates: i.e., gym facilties, buildings, endowed chairs for coaches, travel grants, grants to centers, a seemingly never-ending series of lectures, conferences, workshops, etc...
The latest Crimson carries an article about the lack of funding for science buildings that are going up. FAS is reporting a deficit of $80 million as a result of aggressive building and expanding the faculty. The $26 billion endowment is not a figure that the university can work with easily, especially as it is also setting aside funds for the Allston expansion.

sakky · May 14, 2006, 3:10pm

[quote]
You are wrong again. Schools charge for overhead against the professors' grants for exactly those things you are talking about (facilities, equipment, etc). In fact it is a real sore point at some schools where the universities get very creative in thinking of overhead things to charge for and thereby grab more of the professors' grants. Stanford is notorious for charging high overhead and a number of professors have fled there to go to UCB, UCSF, and other schools over this point. But the point is that research grants are separate, restricted, controlled pots of money that are usually awarded by outside agencies to professors, not schools, to fund their research. That money is not "fungible" with the money in the financial aid fund or the endowment. The granting agency still has some strings attached to it.

[/quote]

Nobody is saying that the money is COMPLETELY fungible. But there is a lot of slack and mobility attached to general university resources.

To give you a very simple example, MIT is actually quite famous for never charging a dime to anybody for printing - not to students, not to profs, not to anybody. You have to learn "the tricks" of where the free printers are, but that's something that everybody at MIT does within a few months. Hence, you will see, at late night and especially on the weekend, some supremely giant print jobs coming out of the free printers from some of the profs and the graduate students, especially from the some of the paper-happy departments at MIT like the Sloan School or the Political Science department that are notorious for lots and lots of writing. Some of these departments think nothing of creating print jobs that are literally 5 or 6-figures in page length, taking advantage of general MIT printing resources.

I strongly remember at Berkeley how the poli-sci department had to buy all its own paper and stationery for printing. But not so at MIT.

[quote]
To add to Coureur's comments: HBS has its own fund-raising campaign and gets to keep its money. It is notorious for not allowing members of the Harvard community who are not members of HBS to use its facilities. The first university provost was an economist. He was not allowed to use the HBS swimming pool.
GSAS full funding is based on a combination of university fellowships, outside fellowships (such as Mellon, FLAS, Fulbrights, etc...) teaching fellowships and research assistantships. So the university's actual contribution to this full funding package is much less than would appear on the surface. That is true of Harvard and most other universities.
Aside from the fact that, as Coureur points out, grants are not fungible, GSAS and College funds are not, either. Many donations to the College are not fungible and thus not available to support undergraduates: i.e., gym facilties, buildings, endowed chairs for coaches, travel grants, grants to centers, a seemingly never-ending series of lectures, conferences, workshops, etc...
The latest Crimson carries an article about the lack of funding for science buildings that are going up. FAS is reporting a deficit of $80 million as a result of aggressive building and expanding the faculty. The $26 billion endowment is not a figure that the university can work with easily, especially as it is also setting aside funds for the Allston expansion.

[/quote]

Come on, guys. Y'all are just choosing not to think creatively. I am not asking you to be like Enron. I am just asking you to come up with ways to shift some of the funding around.

For example, coureur says that universities charge for use of resources. That is sometimes true. But it doesn't HAVE to be true. Nowhere is that set in stone that that has to be the case. Any university can simply decide that a particular resource is open to all profs without charge. That is what MIT has done for its printing resources, for example.

Either that, or a university can simply decide to take advantage of its economies of scale. Again, I will use a simple example from MIT. As a member of MIT, you are entitled to get a licensed copy of the latest MS Windows and MS Office for a cut-rate price, I think something like $10 each. That is true whether you are a prof, a staffer, or a student. That is because MIT has negotiated a large educational volume discount from Microsoft. What that means is that whenever any department wants to buy more desktops or laptops, they no longer have to pay full price for Windows or Offic. They can just get bare systems and use the MIT software discount. The same is true for a wide range of other otherwise extremely expensive software programs - Mathematica, Matlab, Oracle, whatever. The point is, nobody at MIT ever has to pay full price for many popular pieces of engineering software packages. I am not saying that they don't pay nothing. I am saying that they pay far less than they would normally. The volume discount alone ensures that this is the case.

I never said that ALL money was COMPLETELY fungible. I am saying that there are a lot of funds that are indeed highly fungible. And when they are not, they are not because a school chooses that they should not be fungible. For example, again, when a school chooses to charge profs for certain resources, that is an actual choice that the school has made. The school doesn't have to do that, rather it CHOOSES to do that. And that's what I'm talking about when I talk about creativity. I am talking about the fact that universities can make different choices if they really want to. In many cases, it's because they don't want to make different choices and that's why the current state of funding is the way that it is.

Now, I'm not saying that there is anything necessarily wrong with that. Every school has the right to allocate funding in the way it sees fit. But we should acknowledge that this is a series of choices that were made. Nobody forced the school to make these choices. Just like MIT made a choice to offer free printing and cheap Microsoft software to everybody at MIT, any other school could offer some other resource for free or cheap to everybody at their school.

As a case in point, consider this. You talk about gyms, so let's talk about them. It is true that HBS restricts use of the Shad gym to only people who are members of the HBS community. Shad is probably the nicest gym at Harvard. But check this out. The regular Harvard athletic facilities (Blodgett, Malkin, Hemenway) are open to everybody at Harvard - INCLUDING HBS people. In other words, HBS people can use the general Harvard gym. But general Harvard people cannot use the HBS gym. What's wrong with this picture? Actually, nothing is wrong with the picture. It's that Harvard made a choice that the general Harvard gym would be open to everybody, including the HBS people who have their own gym.

In fact, actually, HBS students actually get FREE usage of the general Harvard gym. Many other Harvard graduate students have to actually pay quite a bit of money for a full membership. For example, if you're a student in the Divinity School or the Kennedy School, you have to pay quite a rather hefty membership fee to get into Malkin. Now, I'm sure there is some sort of internal subsidization going in (i.e. HBS probably agrees to pay some sort of fee to the general Harvard fund to give all its students free access to the general Harvard gym, but KSG and HDS don't do that), but that just attests to the point I made before about the fungibility of funding. I am fairly certain that nobody ever donated or granted money to HBS for the specific purpose of providing free access for students to the general Harvard gym. Either HBS or general Harvard made the choice that they want to give HBS students free access to all the gyms.

<a href="http://www.athletics.harvard.edu/recreation/Ath_Memberships/pricing.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.athletics.harvard.edu/recreation/Ath_Memberships/pricing.html</a>

The point is, all this free or cheap stuff really starts to add up. For example, HBS can now start actually slightly lower its fellowships but compensate for that fact by saying that all students have free access to all the gyms for the whole year. In fact, HBS does not lower its fellowships (its fellowships are some of the highest in the country), but it COULD. It all gets down the fatc that there is a significant amount of fungibility of funding. I agree that not ALL funding is fungible. But a lot is. And plenty of the funding that is not fungible is not so because the school doesn't WANT it to be fungible. It could be if the school simply made different accounting choices.

just_forget_me · May 14, 2006, 4:38pm

Is Shad really nicer than the remodeled Hemingway (which is an HLS gym, but FAS has access).

marite · May 14, 2006, 10:05pm

Sakky:

Perhaps you can persuade HBS, HLS and HMS to share their wealth with the College and the poorer professional schools (HDS, HGSE and even GSAS). Scores of people have tried in vain for, lo, these many many years. It might help the poor graduates students to stop having to eat ramen noodles as their main meals.

sakky · May 21, 2006, 1:38pm

Marite, in some sense, that's already happening. For example, certain doctoral programs are joint programs 2 of the various constituent schools. For example, the PhD program in Business Economics (BE) is a joint program between HBS and GSAS. I believe that much of the funding for the BE doctoral stipend is paid out of HBS, and in fact, all of it may be. Furthermore, these BE students have full use of HBS facilities because they are considered HBS students. So in that sense, HBS is, to some extent, sharing its wealth with GSAS. GSAS does not have to pay full freight to support these joint students.

Besides, I think Harvard may not be the best example because of the balkanization of its various schools. I think a better example might be MIT. Take the Sloan School. Lots of Sloan MBA alumni donate back to Sloan. Sloan uses that money to expand its facilities and resources. But these resources then become available to everybody at MIT. For example, any MIT student can take classes at Sloan, including the MBA courses, when space is available. So if you're an engineering doctoral student and you want to take MBA classes on Marketing or Finance or Technology Strategy, then you just sign up for the Sloan class and they'll take you on space-available basis. All of the various Sloan guest-speaker talks and conferences are also available to the general MIT community. So if Jack Welch or Bob Metcalfe or some other business tycoon comes in to talk to the Sloan students and you're from some other MIT department and you want to attend anyway, you just go. Nobody is going to stop you. One of the more enduring traditions of Sloan is the "C-function", which is basically just a weekly party for the MBA students paid out of Sloan funds. But everybody at MIT is welcome to go. By the same token, Sloan students are free to use resources at the other MIT departments. They are free to use, say, MIT Media Lab resources or resources at the MIT Economics Department or the School of Engineering, etc. etc.

Look. The point is, funding is highly fungible. Not 100% fungible, but highly fungible nonetheless. It all boils down to the choices that schools make. Coureur talked about how some schools charge their profs for use of resources. This is true, but it actually proves my point. Schools don't HAVE to do that. They CHOOSE to do that. Schools have power to build resources which they can then offer as a 'public good' either for free or on a subsidized basis, just like the government offers free public K-12 education. The government COULD charge for K-12 education, but has decided not to because a decision was made that offering free education is in the public interest. Similarly, many other resources and infrastructural offerings are built by the government and provided to the public without charge - i.e. roads, public libraries, police, firemen, etc. Or they are offered on a highly subsidized basis, such as public universities, national parks (which charge an entrance fee, but that fee is subsidized), etc.

Universities like Harvard and MIT can choose to do the same thing in the sense that they can choose to offer resources either for free or on a subsidized basis. They often do. Again, MIT offers free printing to all. MIT offers free extensive computing resources through the ATHENA system and subsidizes anybody at MIT to get licenses for most popular software packages such as MSWindows, MSOffice, or Matlab for cheap.

The point is, nobody says that a school HAS to charge for resources. A school can choose not to charge. The more resources are available to profs, the less they have to ask for those resources in their grant applications. One contrast would be to take the health-care insurance systems around the world. In the US, health-care insurance is privatized. You have to get your own insurance, either through an employer, or by buying it yourself (or qualifying for Medicare or Medicaid). American entrepeneurs and small businessmen in particular need to worry about getting their own health insurance. In Western Europe, health-care insurance is provided by the government and that obviates the need to get your own. So if you're an American small business owner, you have to pay for your own health-care insurance. If you're a British small business owner, you do not. Hence, the money that you would have spent on your insurance can now be spent on other things, such as expanding your business. Hence, the more resources that a university makes available as a public good, the more shifting of funds a prof can do, including funding more graduate students. In other words, fungibility. To say that profs can't do that because they get charged by the university for their resources is really a problem of the university's own making. It's like a child who murders both his parents and then begs for mercy because he's now an orphan.

Besides, getting back to the original topic, consider this. As we all know, Harvard has an extremely finely tuned and powerful alumni-donation program whose express purpose is to garner more donations. What if Harvard decided to start a new donation drive to get alumni to donate to a new fund whose purpose is to offer free tuition to all undergrads and really put its marketing muscle behind this initiative? I have a strong feeling that a lot of alumni would donate to this drive. Not all, obviously, but I suspect that many would. Keep this drive up for a number of decades and I suspect that this fund would grow quite large.

I agree that it would take a while for Harvard to build up such a fund. But Harvard could do it. After all, right now, plenty of Harvard undergrads are getting some sort of grants/work-study from Harvard and hence are not paying full tuition to Harvard anyway. As was said, anybody whose families make less than $60k pay nothing. And by offering free tuition to all undergrads, you can downsize/redeploy those Harvard billing employees whose job is to collect and manage tuition payments from undergrads.

Look, the point is, if a rich univeristy like Harvard wanted to provide free tuition or better doctoral fellowships, or whatever it is, it has the resources to do it. The question becomes whether somebody wants to do it and whether there is a leader with the political strength to do it. But it is undeniable that Harvard has the resources to do it. I agree that there may be rules that restrict where funding can go, but in many cases, these are rules of Harvard's own making.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Harvard should do it. I am simply pointing out that it CAN do it if it wants to.

marite · May 21, 2006, 1:56pm

Besides, I think Harvard may not be the best example because of the balkanization of its various schools.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Harvard should do it. I am simply pointing out that it CAN do it if it wants to.

There is something wrong in the logic from one paragraph to the next.

Look, the point is, if a rich univeristy like Harvard wanted to provide free tuition or better doctoral fellowships, or whatever it is, it has the resources to do it.

I invite you to talk to the GSAS Dean. At the end of its campaign, Harvard had a shortfall of $14million in its graduate fellowship endowment. All of the sports coaches had gotten endowed chairs at the very beginning of the campaign. Unfortunately for the grad students, the funds for these chairs were not available for grad fellowships (or for undergraduate scholarships, either).

marite · May 21, 2006, 2:01pm

There is something wrong in the logic from one paragraph to the next. Why use Harvard as an example if Harvard is a poor one? Never mind the title of this thread. It is, after all, not about some other university with a fraction of the endowment but without a tub on its own bottom system (more than just a mentality) that makes it impossible for an economist, even if he is provost to use HBS 's swimming pool, let alone for the College or GSAS to divert some of HBS's funds.

I invite you to talk to the GSAS Dean. At the end of its campaign, Harvard had a shortfall of $14million in its graduate fellowship endowment. All of the sports coaches had gotten endowed chairs at the very beginning of the campaign. Unfortunately for the grad students, the funds for these chairs were not available for grad fellowships (or for undergraduate scholarships, either).

And I will say, Harvard will be able to do it after some important structural barriers have been removed and some funds have been raised. Future tense, not present tense. Meanwhile, a large portion of the $26k endowment is being set aside for expansion into Allston. Meanwhile, FAS is facing a $80million deficit.

Byerly · May 21, 2006, 3:30pm

One of the hardest things for an institution with a $26 billion endowment (or whatever it will be after June 30) to do is to approach the alumni and friends and tell them why its not just enough - and why another $10 billion is needed!

The vision of the bricks-and-mortar expansion in Allston, the new residential houses along the River, the new school of engineering, new athletic facilities etc will happily be supplemented by a demonstrated need for cash to "balance" the FAS budget (ie, pay for a huge expansion in the number of tenured faculty!)

sakky · May 21, 2006, 5:03pm

[quote]
There is something wrong in the logic from one paragraph to the next. Why use Harvard as an example if Harvard is a poor one? Never mind the title of this thread. It is, after all, not about some other university with a fraction of the endowment but without a tub on its own bottom system (more than just a mentality) that makes it impossible for an economist, even if he is provost to use HBS 's swimming pool, let alone for the College or GSAS to divert some of HBS's funds

[/quote]

[quote]
And I will say, Harvard will be able to do it after some important structural barriers have been removed and some funds have been raised. Future tense, not present tense. Meanwhile, a large portion of the $26k endowment is being set aside for expansion into Allston. Meanwhile, FAS is facing a $80million deficit.

[/quote]

Right there, you just answered your own question. What I mean by Harvard as being a poor example is that the way that Harvard is CURRENTLY structured, I agree that things may be difficult. But I don't take the topic of this thread as something that Harvard can do only today. Obviously nobody, least of all me, expects Harvard to stop charging fees today. What I am talking about is what Harvard could be IN THE FUTURE, if it wants to be. And the main point is that Harvard could eventually one day become a school that doesn't charge fees and provides massive financial support to all of its doctoral students, if it wants to do that and can find the political will to do that.

[quote]
I invite you to talk to the GSAS Dean. At the end of its campaign, Harvard had a shortfall of $14million in its graduate fellowship endowment. All of the sports coaches had gotten endowed chairs at the very beginning of the campaign. Unfortunately for the grad students, the funds for these chairs were not available for grad fellowships (or for undergraduate scholarships, either)

[/quote]

And this is a nonsequitur. Since when is Harvard comprised only of GSAS? Like I have already pointed out, while GSAS may be bereft of funds, HBS is overflowing with money. HBS is just as much of Harvard as GSAS is.

Which leads to another one of my points. The money is there. The question is whether Harvard has the political willpower to organize itself in a way to utilize that money. For example, one very simple way that GSAS can "access" HBS money is to simply expand the joint programs with HBS. For example, admit fewer students into the pure Harvard Economics PhD program and admit more students into the Harvard Business Economics PhD program. The more students that can be switched into the joint programs, the more costs can be shifted onto the HBS ledger.

My point is this. You can't really say that Harvard "can't" do certain things. What we should be saying is that Harvard doesn't WANT to do certain things. The reasons why Harvard can't do certain things is mostly because of organizational rules of Harvard's own making. Harvard could unmake these rules. Will that take time? Of course! Nobody expects this to be done today. I'm sure it will take years, probably decades. But it can be done. The key is that you have to WANT to do it. And heck, if Harvard had had this conversation decades ago, then Harvard might right now be able to not charge tuition or give all doctoral students lavish stipends or whatever. A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.

[quote]
One of the hardest things for an institution with a $26 billion endowment (or whatever it will be after June 30) to do is to approach the alumni and friends and tell them why its not just enough - and why another $10 billion is needed

[/quote]

Considering Harvard's recent donation drive success, it apparently isn't THAT hard.

Besides, consider what marite is saying. If GSAS is really hurting for money, then GSAS can use that as a reason for why they need more donations. GSAS can start its own drive and approach its own alumni and say "Well, although Harvard has $26 billion on paper, we are running a shortfall, therefore you should donate to us."

It also means that GSAS should become more innovative. One of the biggest reasons why HBS is so flush with cash is because of its extensive outreach programs with the business community, culminating with the huge executive education cash cow programs that bring in successful businessmen from around the world for short programs that cost an arm and a leg (but are usually paid for by the employers). KSG does the same thing. So maybe GSAS should start doing the same. I'm quite sure there are lots of people around the world who would pay good money to attend some special GSAS seminars or whatnot.

So the point is this. Either we have a failure of imagination in terms of not exploiting revenue-generating opportunities, or the organizational strictures within GSAS are more widespread than I thought. Either way, it's a problem.

Now, again, don't get me wrong. I am not saying that Harvard should necessariliy offer free tuition to undergrads, or offer lavish subsidies to its doctoral students. My simple point is that it could do these things if it really wanted to. Specifically, Harvard could choose to change its internal rules to allow these initiatives to progress. Harvard's fate lies in its own hands.

marite · May 21, 2006, 6:16pm

Sakky, you refuse to acknowledge that the $26 billion is not available to ALL of Harvard equally; and that what it MAY be able to do in the FUTURE, it CANNOT DO RIGHT NOW.

It is you who fill your posts with non-sequiturs. You keep on writing CAN not WILL BE ABLE to. There's a difference.

marite · May 21, 2006, 6:19pm

Byerly:

I agree that the FAS deficit is a good thing because the priorities are good. Once the fundraising campaign kicks off, this set of priorities will be a powerful argument to donors. In the meantime, however, Harvard does not have the funds to offer full rides to all its students, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, especially since it cannot tap the funds of its wealthiest schools for that purpose.

Byerly · May 21, 2006, 10:27pm

Few graduates, including me, would ever give another nickel if Harvard started using our contributions to give "free" education to the offspring of billionaires.

Don't waste time wondering when THAT little "reform" will come along - even though it would obviously do wonders for the yield rate!

marite · May 21, 2006, 10:52pm

I know of at least one billlionnaire's kid who applied and asked for funding. And why not? The money belonged to the parents, not the kid. 
Personally, I would not be upset if my contributions went to funding a billionnaire's kid or two. I doubt many go to grad school. And one can make the argument that they (or their grateful parents) would contribute to cash-poor GSAS. In fact, I see it as a more likely scenario than expecting HLS or HBS to share their wealth with GSAS.

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If Harvard has a 26 billion dollar endowment, why does it charge fees?

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