> UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.

Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues? This is Philadelphia's problem, the university is just a business operating in the city.

I think that speaks to the low bar we have come to expect from our endowed institutions today more than anything else.

American Universities, historically, are supposed to improve not just their students’ lives but also society as a whole, especially as serving as boosters for the city they’re in and their immediate neighbors. That’s why they’re nonprofits. That’s also likely their strongest lifeline to remain relevant in the future rather than as the hollow alumni clubs and gatekeepers their critics say they are, with AI/the internet/online schooling/topic of the day breaking down socioeconomic barriers to knowledge access

That’s why the Carnegies and Mellons built libraries, museums, and the very literally named Carnegie-Mellon university, back then. Now it seems like the first thing billionaires today do is isolate themselves and their wealth from the masses as much as possible.

> That’s why the Carnegies and Mellons built libraries, museums, and the very literally named Carnegie-Mellon university, back then. Now it seems like the first thing billionaires today do is isolate themselves and their wealth from the masses as much as possible.

Historically speaking, wealth accumulation was borderline impossible because the incentive to steal it was so large. You had to become a king, and then constantly murder people trying to take the throne, because everyone had the attitude that the only way to acquire wealth was to steal it from others. And that never really worked out well since the king was always threatened by death (the Sword of Damocles).

This stopped when the upper classes realized it was cheaper and more effective to raise the living standard of everyone else than it is to prevent everyone else from stealing their wealth. When you create wealth, you share some of it with others.

In other words, create a society where everyone has salt and pepper, rather than try to hoard salt/pepper for financial gain.

That's true of schooling as well. In the Middle Ages, only the rich and powerful could read and write. Now that everyone knows how to read, Facebook has a trillion-dollar business selling words.

This mentality is present in FOSS to some extent, but it isn't present for education anymore. Everyone seems to think good universities are a perpetually limited good, so we fight over limited admissions spots rather than figure out a way to deliver high quality education to the masses.

It's stupid, because bumping up the difficulty is how we make education worthwhile.

> You had to become a king, and then constantly murder people trying to take the throne

There’s a bit more to it than that. There’s a reason Xi Jinping doesn’t need to murder members of his cabinet all the time. A stable government has a winning coalition which keeps the leader in power. The leader has to keep them happy which in small enough governments he can do by paying them directly.

In a democracy, the winning coalition is way too large to simply pay supporters. The government has to fund public works which are more cost effective. A larger winning coalition is better for the median person for this reason.

I doubt they could even if they wanted to. All problems cannot be solved by throwing money at them, and the local governments may not be cooperative or efficient enough to use the money. There are chemically engineered drugs that will gigafry your brain into addiction in one dose getting better every day. Police departments all over the country/west seem to be ineffective at enforcing order, courts are too delayed and too lenient on sentencing, list goes on. Problems on the public side that private enterprise can't really fix without a lot of cooperation. Maybe in a much less regulated world like the Carnegie's, they would be able to try a lot of things without permission, now it would take years of begging to get a permit to build a drug rehab centre somewhere no matter how rich you are and the neighbors would block it.

At the same time there are many places that seem to have figured it out. The way Philadelphia chooses to run their city isn’t the only way.

Detroit's actually kind of impressive the drop that Detroit's managed to obtain in the last four years since Covid. The jump at 2020 was probably horrifying to the citizens, yet afterward, really serious downward trend. 262 murder / 969 woundings (2020) to 149 / 417 (2024). ~57%/43% of the 2020 numbers. Pretty impressive from a crime and gun violence perspective. Down below pre-Covid numbers while a lot of cities are still elevated.

UPenn is a land-grant institution, they are not "just a business" they were given land and money specifically to serve the public good. They're why we have engineering degrees, the government specifically wanted institutions that taught practical marketable skills and to do research in those fields.

> They were given land and money specifically to serve the public good.

Their duty is to deliver education. It's not solving political problems meant for elected officials (and the population at large).

If their duty is to deliver education, why are they sitting on a $20B hoard?

Presumably they could spend a little bit of that to deliver some more education, couldn’t they?

there are many, many people who are paid a lot of money to pretend to believe that the universities should actually be spending less and keeping more for their endowments because that strategy would enable the biggest impact at some indeterminate point in the future

They spend $9 billion annually on exactly that. This "hoard" can, checks notes, fund barely two years of operations.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231...

Interestingly, according to the report in your link, UPenn pays over 3 billion dollars in salaries, but it has around 1,400 faculty for ~10,000 students. This means that either the instructors are fabulously well paid, or that the vast majority of money is going somewhere else. And indeed according to [0] just 4.64% of salaries are paid to instructional staff, with 23.9% or 2078 of paid employees being management staff. So if I am reading this correctly, they have far more administrators than actual academics, which is rather incredible. Incidentally, according to the same link the median percentage of salaries paid to instructional staff is 30% for similar doctoral universities.

[0] https://datausa.io/profile/university/university-of-pennsylv...

Thanks. Had not actually looked at the numbers of Philly that in depth. Unfortunately, has personally started to be such cynicism it's often expected there's usually a massively lopsided overhead of administrators with moderately paid academics and money that appears to vanish.

Harvard really did a number on my belief in American academia, and then finding out that students in Columbia were complaining they had to read made me not want to look at those types of statistics very often.

Anyways, appreciate the work of actually delving into the payscales, teacher / administrator ratios, and allocation of funding. Also, the https://datausa.io/ site's another interesting one to add to the list of public available dataset visualization, plotting, and summarization websites.

Actually, quick check from a different direction at least seems to support some of the Philly issues. Violent Crime rate per county on datausa.io: https://datausa.io/map?measure=E1cxD&groups%5B0%5D=24yFSi%7C...

Death by Homicide is also interesting lateral, although Mississippi apparently has a huge issue all over the state. Many 25+ / 100,000 areas: https://datausa.io/map?measure=ZfwdDB&groups%5B0%5D=24yFSi%7...

Unfortunately, website seems to trigger alot of Network Errors on the map portion of the site.

In the short term, yes. Just like an orchard owner can chop down his trees and sell firewood to make a little more money this year.

Endowments are not just slush funds that can be used at leadership’s discretion; they are often from donated monies with specific stipulations set by donors on how, where, and what those funds can and cannot be spent on.

college endowments are invested. Managing these investments is a huge focus of universities

> If their duty is to deliver education, why are they sitting on a $20B hoard?

Rich alumni, patents, etc. Also, it is a warchest for innovation and expansion. Same thing as other businesses, you have a surplus of cash for reinvestment.

> UPenn is a land-grant institution

It isn't.

Despite the name, it's actually a private university.

Penn State is Pennsylvania's land grant university.

> UPenn is a land-grant institution

The University of Pennsylvania is one of the nine colonial colleges founded before the United States existed. It predates land grant institutions by over a century. I think you are confusing it with Pennsylvania State University, which is a land grant institution.

Wow an actual topic on HN that I know about. I spent 3.5 years studying the history of UPenn - including writing my thesis in its history - and it is definitely not a land grant university.

If they are like most other schools with a low income neighborhood nearby, they probably offer an entire k-12 education sequence for these kids ran under their education major’s department. Likewise their hospital probably treats low income people in the community. And of course the school itself is a massive jobs program for low income people in the area as well, who might qualify for reduced or no cost tuition for themselves or their kids.

>Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues?

Who's responsibility is it? Have you seen how the government operates? Why wouldn't UPENN want to help solve it?

You're asking the wrong question: why would they?

How much have you contributed to Philly's woes?

Probably nothing, because it doesn't benefit you.

> How much have you contributed to Philly's woes?

To resolve Philly's woes?

> Probably nothing, because it doesn't benefit you.

If they pay taxes...

It is the government's responsibility. Change your government with votes.

OK, but they do exist to educate people, and have a comically large endowment to do it with that only keeps growing. I guess their plan is to grow the endowment until all human beings everywhere can get full ride UPenn scholarships?

Going up is what an endowment is supposed to do; you spend some part of the return on operational needs, while also growing the base so you have greater (nominal, and hopefully also real) capacity for that downstream.

If, over the long term, an endowment isn’t growing, it’s being mismanaged.

Thetrace.org is in fact pretty sweet looking. Interesting that philly seems to be shot to injur and next door camden seems to be shoot to kill.

What is the argument here, exactly?

You left off

(Drugs) https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/mexico-depicts-phi...

So if a university has money, learning there should be free?

If you don't have guns, you won't have gun violence, but I guess the second amendment won't be changed any time soon.

> So if a university has money, learning there should be free?

Not an unreasonable proposition. The purpose of the university is ostensibly to provide an education, not to continue hoarding more and more money.

> purpose of the university is ostensibly to provide an education

One of the purposes. They’re also centres for learning and research and repositories of knowledge.

Also known as education

> Also known as education

No. There are non-teaching research universities. Many universities have non-teaching faculty. Learning != teaching != education.

If they were spending the money on those things, this might be an argument. But they're not spending it; they're hoarding it.

> If they were spending the money on those things, this might be an argument. But they're not spending it; they're hoarding it

There is something ironic about people who work in start-ups arguing for endowments to be spent down. Who do you think gives money to the VC funds?

They are spending it. On average they spend about 5% of it per year. In 2023 that was $975 million. It goes 53% to instruction, 22% to health care, 15% to student aid, and 10% to research, academic support, and other services.

The point of an endowment is to provide long term support for whatever the purpose is of that endowment. That is done by investing it and using the investment earnings for that purpose.

I don't think you understand how endowments work.

It's not a pile of gold sitting in a vault on campus. It's an account which is productively invested and generating returns which are what's actually used for funding operations. A $20 billion endowment would be expected to produce about $1 billion per year, or around 20% of the annual operating budget. They need to bring in about $4 Billion more dollars per year to keep the lights on.

I do understand actually, and my argument is that this wouldn't be acceptable in any other category of nonprofit, so why is it acceptable for universities? If the Red Cross decided to take donations and then hoard a 20 billion dollar endowment while also charging top dollar for disaster relief, people wouldn't accept that as a legitimate strategy. Why is it suddenly OK when a university does it?

$9 billion annually [1] qualifies as not spending it, I guess. I wish people actually checked figures before ranting online.

1- https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231...

The page you linked shows their revenue is $9.93B/year and is greater than their expenses. So clearly they're not spending down the principal.

That’s because donors won’t let them drain all the principal in a few years.

UPenn’s revenue includes “sales of assets” and “investment income,” i.e., taking some part of the endowment annually to fund their operations.

I disagree. I think teaching is the sole purpose of a university. Research is ancillary to that, and if an organization only did research but didn't teach I would not say they get to call themselves a university any more.

> I think teaching is the sole purpose of a university

Cool. This isn't how the word works in practice. More importantly, it isn't how the trustees of the people who gave those universities the money asked for it to be used. (Nor the government or the granting agencies.)

> if an organization only did research but didn't teach I would not say they get to call themselves a university any more

Again, cool. This isn't true in reality. Research universities famously put research first, which is why they can attract top faculty.

You can disagree but that doesn't change anything. Most major universities are research institutions that also teach people, and hopefully bring up some through the ranks to further research/academia/human knowledge.

Without research there would be nothing new to teach, Without research diseases wouldn't be cured. A lot of amazing things we have came from universities.

Medical research is a profit center for many universities, not a cost center. They get funded by grants from external entities like the NIH and get to skim off the top of each grant for overhead. As one outsized example, my alma mater got $583MM in NIH grants in one year. I'm not saying universities don't fund research from their own coffers, but it's important to understand how much funding comes from the government and from other sources.

I wasn't addressing that. I was solely addressing the idea that universities were teaching centers that do research ancillary. A lot of them would consider that backwards. They're research institutions that also teach.

For a private school, they can choose how to spend their money. Hoarding it is one option.

For the federal government, they can choose how they allocate grants. Withholding grants from greedy schools is one option.

> Withholding grants from greedy schools is one option

At that point, stop writing grants. Sending money to sub-optimal grantees to effect an education/investment policy is wasteful.

Is there a coherent argument tying A to B here? Schools have large endowments and are also sometimes located in violent cities. Is it your contention that one causes the other, or even could in theory affect the other? Otherwise I don’t see the point, you might as well bring up the number of potholes in Philadelphia too.

Also Northwestern is in Evanston, not Chicago. Two different cities.

This is inequality - allowing some entities to accrue out of the world wealth while others starve.

The US has the philosophical stance that this is accepted. However, history shows that is is a balance that will collapse into civil war eventually if allowed to skew to far.

They are not sitting on it. They spend about 5% of it annually.

> UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.

Endowments have strings attached that limits the use of funds, the endowed money isn’t just a general slush fund: https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/Understanding-College-and-U...

Also, an endowment is meant to be perpetual, so only a small fraction of it is spent every year to ensure the principal amount doesn’t go down. “Don’t kill the golden goose” in other words.

Just want to point out that Philadelphia’s homicide count is down ~40% from last year. And Penn’s “haven” looks similar to the other affluent commercial corridors throughout the city.

That's actually fair. Philly's 2022 numbers were 503 murders / 1793 woundings, and 2023 numbers were 422 murders / 1376 woundings. 84% murders / 76.5% woundings. Definitely trending in a better direction. If the 2024 numbers arrive and Philly's still looking better than maybe things are changing for the positive in that area.

philadelphia rots? please. I grew up in baltimore. philly is not what a rotting city looks like.