a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  3181 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Universities Are Becoming Billion-Dollar Hedge Funds With Schools Attached

That's not even what it's saying, though. This is the issue, presented in a sentence structured for adults:

    Stephen Mandel, founder of a hedge fund with 24 billion dollars under management, got a building named after him because he managed Dartmouth's endowment for free.

Fuckin' A. How much did it cost to name a building after him? Zilch. How much did he make them that year? $247 million. I mean, sure. Be outraged. That's your right. But I have no problem with this.

Jeff Selingo, editor of the Chronicle for Higher Education, made the point that really, you should be checking the endowment size of colleges while shopping for schools for your kids. Why? The less money they have, the more they're going to be scrabbling for tuition dollars from over-inflated luxury dorms. The less money they have, the more tuition is going to bobble around based on shortfalls in the state budget. The less money they have, the more likely they are to hire and fire untenured professors and rely on sweatshop TAs to teach your kids. The smart schools started banking their investments and working towards autonomy. Dartmouth? Those horrible pricks that named a building after their hedge fund manager? Gave out $81m in scholarships last year. David Swensen, the Golden God that has been managing Yale's endowment since 1985, has allowed Yale to give out $119m.

Or, you know, you could be like U of Montana, with a whopping $176m endowment, that cut the scholarship of a friend of mine (and 300 of her closest friends) on two weeks notice last month. I guess that's better somehow.