USC's Debt Load Compared to Stanford

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Southern California
1

<p>USC presently has about $1.2B in debt, per the following link:</p>

<p>BondsOnline:</a> Credit Ratings for Municipal and Corporate Bonds</p>

<p>The good news is that we have $1.7B liquidity, which means we have cash on hand. Compare that to Stanford, which has billions in illiquid and unfunded private investments (i.e., hedge fund or "bet the Farm (get it)" private equity hocus pocus dollars):</p>

<p>BondsOnline:</a> Credit Ratings for Municipal and Corporate Bonds</p>

<p>I'm sure some of you numbers-crunchers will have fun dissecting the stats.</p>

2

<p>Whatever you are implying, Stanford has the AAA rating while USC only has AA1. </p>

<p>End of discussion.</p>

3

<p>it could be better… Of course the biggest weakness is USC endowment is just not big enough… It needs to be 10 billion to be become ELITE.</p>

<p>Aa far as stanford goes, i don’t think anyone is seriously dumb enough to say negative anything about them…</p>

<p>But when the stock market bubble bursts again, I wonder how bad endowments will get crushed again all over the country.</p>

4

<p>^^ agreed.</p>

5

<p>Actually I think Stanford’s highly leveraged in illiquid assets. Harvard is too, actually. I’m curious in finding out how much of Stanford’s annual contributions consists of stock as opposed to cash and then comparing that to USC’s contributions.</p>

6

<p>yeah derivatives are DANGEROUS… THe UC system got killed in the derivatives market or whatever the hell they were doing and now allegedly they have pledged tution increases as collateral to Wall Street to be able to continue to borrow and their unfunded liabilites are EXPLODING.</p>

7

<p>If you read the bond analysis for Stanford it is amazing how nebulous and vague the description of investments is in the second bullet of the challenges section…as if the more complex they sound the stronger the investments are.</p>