<p>^^^^
@JHS - Penn has more than one hospital?</p>
<p>“Hand-wringing about whether an endowment of $6 billion or $7 billion is enough, and how fast it should take you to raise more than $3 billion, is kind of the epitome of a first-world problem.”</p>
<p>The University of Chicago, in terms of its mission and its current resources, is very much the result of being in a highly specialized (some would say inequitable) economic climate. It’s a place dedicated to hiring people to think about things, and paying many of them quite handsomely for it. </p>
<p>Such wealth and research impact arise because these schools engage quite fully in a race to the top, NOT in a considerate process about spreading resources and offerings. UChicago has stated quite clearly that it aims for the tippy top, and if a particular school or two can raise 100% more capital, that fact can seriously encroach upon UChicago’s goal. Hand-wringing (or perhaps more than hand-wringing on campus - I’m fairly sure jobs have been won and lost on this front) will then occur. </p>
<p>As I said above, we’re talking about the haves and the have-a-lots. (Or maybe, the have-a-lots and the haves-an-absurd-amounts.) These schools are all strongly aspirational, and tend to look up and around, rarely down. This is just the way the arms race works nowadays. </p>
<p>Finally, I’m not sure if it’s hand-wringing or not. There seems to be very real cachet in being an excellent comprehensive research university (certainly more now than decades ago), and many schools seem to be mobilizing quite forcefully to meet this goal (see Brown, Yale in STEM, even Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, etc.). </p>
<p>Penn has the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, and Pennsylvania Hospital (which is the oldest continuously operating hospital in the nation). I think there is at least one suburban hospital that it owns as well.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>The suburban hospital was Phoenixville, which Penn has sold.</p>
<p>Has anybody read Chicago-Booth professor John Coltrane’s comment in his The Grumpy Economist blog (University Debt,Thursday, March 20) about the Bloomberg article?</p>
<p>Read the blog. It’s a good explanation of why it makes financial sense. I wish he or another scholar would discuss when the borrowing becomes too much of a good thing. </p>
<p>Apropos the Grumpy Economist’s metaphor: Let me just throw out there that running a university endowment like a hedge fund is not a great idea. </p>
Interesting paper on size of endowments and what they signify
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1787372
“We show that a risky and large endowment signals a combination of three university characteristics: low productivity marginal internal projects; self-interested stakeholders resisting productive expansion; or binding constraints on maximum endowment payouts.”
Maybe that is why despite having smaller endowments than some of the richer Universities like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, Oxford, Caltech and Cambridge still hold their own in terms of being premier institutions of higher learning.