This morning I was reading the World Almanac, something I do to prepare for my weekly trivia match. I happened upon a section that read, “20 largest endowments – U.S. Colleges.” Harvard, with an endowment of $25 billion, was ranked number 1, a good $10 billion ahead of second-place Yale, and the numbers quickly dropped down to the $3-4 billion range for most of the rest of the top 20.<\/p>\n
An endowment is sort of a college\/university’s nest egg. If all goes well, they fund their operations out of interest earned off the endowment. Think what kind of interest Harvard must be earning off a $25 billion endowment. No wonder they’re able to fund programs like offering free tuition to students whose families earn less than $60,000 a year.<\/p>\n
I checked the website of my alma mater, Rhodes College, whom I challenged yesterday to create a program equivalent to Harvard’s. Rhodes has an endowment of $252 million. Hardly chump change, but it’s about 1\/100th of Harvard’s. So maybe they legitimately couldn’t implement a similar program.<\/p>\n
I still believe in the spirit of the challenge I made though. This society is becoming more and more polarized into haves and have-nots, and those lucky enough to be “haves” need to assume more responsibility to ensure that opportunity is available to all, not just other “haves.”<\/p>\n
All right. End of rant. Got a lot to get done today, so my lunchtime posts are going to be short.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning I was reading the World Almanac, something I do to prepare for my weekly trivia match. I happened upon a section that read, “20 largest endowments – U.S. Colleges.” Harvard, with an endowment of $25 billion, was ranked number 1, a good $10 billion ahead of second-place Yale, and the numbers quickly dropped … Continue reading “Followup to my challenge to Rhodes: Why Harvard can afford to give free rides”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}