Yep. After all, where on Earth does all the tuition money actually go? The buildings are nice and there are way too many overpaid administrators, but even still that can't possibly account for all the $$$ flowing in.

The whole idea behind endowments used to be that they could maintain the institution through tough times. But nowadays, there's an expectation that endowments should continue to grow during a recession, even if that means cutting the institution to the bone. And administration hierarchies keep getting deeper; they're never on the chopping block.

Working at a pretty famous institution with a 6+ billion endowment...in June 2020 the president basically said "we're performing layoffs, stopping all retirement contributions, hiring freeze, and no raises for anyone."

Then gave some additional reasons as to why they couldn't dip into the endowment to save jobs/help those laid off.

So I guess it wasn't for tough times after all?

Lol those aren’t academics, they’re administrators. It’s a pretty simple difference.

Academia is pretty ruthless these days too -- publish or perish.

Totally, but these issues are also completely different.

What do you expect? Any activity that gets preferential tax treatment is going to be used as a pretext for otherwise low margin business activity.

I agree with the argument that this is being done by administrators, not academics, but there's a simple solution: tax endowments of private universities and use the money for state schools, trade schools, and community colleges.

Temple is a state school. (Okay, I think I should clarify it's kinda complicated, it's not technically a state college, but it's a peer of penn state in the weird PA hybrid scheme. So if you thought Penn state was public, Temple is equivalently so.)

Well shit, and the state doesn't actually own the endowment? That's ridiculous. Take those assets into state ownership.