<p>ATM= At the moment, btw.</p>
<p>Feel free to post which you think are the most financially sound during this recession and have been the least affected during this financial/stock market crisis (from late 2008).</p>
<p>The Stable:
If I were to narrow it down to two schools, I would say that both the University of Pennsylvania and the Johns Hopkins University are two of the least affected schools.
I know from observing university reactions and their actual actions that these two schools are probably the least severely impacted by the recession and are actually holding on pretty tightly. Neither one of these schools is cancelling/downsizing academic courses/programs (ala Dartmouth, Harvard, etc) or Trying to aggressively layoff employees/buy-them out like Harvard.
However, both of these schools, have definitely taken a hit. Endowments are down about 20-25% for both of these schools and budget/spending has been cut a bit as well.
However, here is where these two schools are sufficiently stronger than their peers:</p>
<p>UPenn gets only around 9% of its average annual operating budget from the endowment. Hopkins gets 5%. Still, both schools are able to spend multiple billions on operating every year. I'm not 100% sure about UPenn, but Hopkins spent $3.7 Billion on operations last year, which is easily close to 2 times the amount of their current endowment worth.
The reason for their ability to rely less on endowment for operating expenses is due to an overall greater proportion of reliance on tuition and federal dollars. Hopkins, for example, is the number one recipient of federal funding in the country with more than $1.5 Billion in research funded last year by the government. This money helps go towards creating jobs for lab assistants, crews, etc and also severely helps reduce a lot of the admistrative costs involved with performing high-performance undergraduate and graduate level research. Upenn, like Hopkins, is also a large research university and while it doesn't get as heavily federally funded as Hopkins (which Hopkins enjoys due to the closer location of D.C. and the pre-eminence of Hopkins in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. Area), it is still more funded federally than other comparable institutions which often reach into their endowments and whatnot to fund their own research privately (like Harvard).
Also, both schools have raised substantial amounts of money that goes towards continuing the construction of buildings and programs. UPenn currently is in the process of its $3.5 Billion Making History campaign, which has already raised $2.3 Billion in necessary funding towards building, financial aid, etc. Hopkins, in late 2008 completed a (at the time) record-breaking campaign of $3.74 Billion that supported many scholarships, deanships, professor chairs, the building of millions of square feet of new buildings, financial aid, and set up two new schools (business, and education). There is very little debt-funded construction going on at either school, unlike Harvard, Princeton, etc.</p>
<p>Due to such conditions, these two are part of the strongest group of elite schools that can withstand this downturn and might be able to make advances in the light of their peer-schools' declines.</p>
<p>The unstable:
If I were to list, off the top of my head, schools that are going to have to decline and regress a lot more to finally be stable, I would have to list Harvard, Princeton, and Yale as my top 3.
There are SO many things wrong with the way they spent money and competed with one another to build non-necessary huge buildings, over-the-top financial aid, and just reckless spending and investing.
For one thing, all three of these schools draw more than 30% (at least...in the case of Yale and PRinceton, something like 40-50%?) of their operating budgets from Endowment. Thus, when endowments sink, they are left with little money to operate and insufficient funds to follow through. Not only that, but they are building and constructing schools, programs, etc that, often, are unnecessary and funded through debt. The Financial Aid for these schools is also quite over-the-top, like for Harvard, which instated a program for allowing families earning up to $180k to only have to pay 10% of their annual income. While this program sounds wonderful on paper, the impact it has on the university's spending and source of revenue is quite astounding.
People think that schools like Harvard are still doing great and whatnot because its endowment is still $25 Billion, but just look at the facts and clear signals that it is in serious distress: Cafeterias on Campus have stopped serving HOT breakfast (i.e. eggs, bacon) to save some money (how much could this even possibly save unless they were in really realllyyy desperate need of cutting a LOT of money from their operating expenses? get the point?), and stopped serving free coffee at some locations. (again, not a big deal, but such a small expenditure cut helps highlight just how strapped for cash they are right now)
There are so many other negatives to list, but I'm to lazy to keep going. Overall, these are clearly 3 FINE institutions, but their academic futures are held in jeopardy because of over-exaggerated spending patterns and over-committing their wealth.</p>
<p>any contradictions or things to point out? I know I may have wounded some prides here, but this is just how I see them and how they really seem to appear.</p>