<p>Interesting fact is that if every Harvard undergraduate paid full tuition it would not cover the interest on Harvard’s debt.</p>
<p>: professors are staying on way past retirement age (and keeping their appointments even when they are not doing any research or teaching more than one class) because they have tenure : !!!##****!!!</p>
<p>All organizations need to be refreshed over time; educational institutions where faculty and staff assume they have jobs for life, whatever their performance, are the ingredients of the institution’s downfall. </p>
<p>An economic downturn provides great cover for eliminating the 1%, 2%, 5% of staff who are not needed or are underperforming. It provides political cover.</p>
<p>Actually, my belief is that 1. there is no retirement age, so profs cannot stay on way past retirement age. Blame Congress and the fed for that, not the universities.
2. profs do go on doing research and teach one course, usually at the behest of the universities who need them to supervise graduate students so they are not left in the lurch. I do not believe that these profs draw a full salary. I know some people who would dearly love to be able to pack up and leave and go abroad (to do further research) but are staying on until their last graduate students have finished their Ph.D.s
3. With tenure, profs cannot be fired for economic reasons unless the university claims financial crisis. This is something that most universities are loath to do because it hampers their ability to raise funds and get themselves out of the crisis. So there is no political cover to be had. I’d be interested to see Harvard claiming financial crisis to lay off faculty when its endowment, shrunken though it is, is still in the $20 billion range.:)</p>
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<p>I’ll say. Dean of Harvard College. Dean of Undergraduate Education. Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Freshman Dean. They even had a Dean of the Summer School. In the four years that D attended I never did sort out all the deans and their various fiefdoms. A lot of them seemed overlapping or totally redundant to me.</p>
<p>I’ve been perplexed by their cutting actually. I went back and found some public quotes about endowment size from 1998 and figured the 10-yr compounded growth since (actually 11 since it’s 2009) and compared it to other Ivy Leagues. </p>
<p>This was acutally earlier this year when the predictions were dire BEFORE the market rebounded somewhat. I was using the gloomy predictions then of what the endowment return would be for fiscal 2009 which for most of these places ends June 30:</p>
<p>1998-2009
Harvard: 7.0%
Princeton: 7.6%
Penn: 3.6%
COlumbia 4.5%</p>
<p>Note the S&P 500 is down in the same time frame.
Now this isn’t investment returns strictly - it reflects donations and spending too, but my point is: Harvard has had years of superb growth that 1 bad year, even if very bad (-30% was the prediction earlier this year), would not wipe it all out.</p>
<p>My take is that they are fat and have been spending like drunken sailors thinking the endowment growth was permanent.</p>
<p>Well, they were certainly under pressure to spend–there was threat of governmental scrutiny of their endowment amount.</p>
<p>^ I don’t believe for a moment that Harvard spent lavish sums because of “pressure” to spend under “threat of government scrutiny.” They spent because they had what they believed to be ever-increasing endowment war chests which could be turned into unbeatable comparative advantages over their rivals. Thus more faculty, more programs, higher-paid faculty, more lavishly funded programs, money spent to pamper undergraduates, money spent on financial aid t make Harvard the envy of the academic world and the lowest-cost option for many students whose family incomes extended well into the 6-figure range—this increasing Harvard’s selectivity over all rivals. Not to mention money spent for the sake of spending money, because the more you spend the more highly you’re ranked under US News’ twisted priorities. Government oversight was th least factor in all this; they spent like drunken sailors because they were drunk on their extraordinary and unequalled wealth, and on all the advantages they thought it could buy.</p>