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Showing posts from August, 2017

Chasing the Endowment Unicorn

Higher education is struggling these days, and there are a lot of solutions from a lot of pundits, all of which tend to be macro in nature: Delivery, cost structures, optimization, curricular adaptations, and many other ideas abound. On the micro level., however, the vast majority of the 1,700 or so private, four-year colleges and universities will point to "increasing our endowment" as one of the most crucial solutions to our internal institutional challenges. This is, in all probability, because the wealthiest institutions in the nation (in terms of endowment resources) are also the best known, and much of the brand of any institution is driven by wealth and reputation and prestige.  And even in this decade and these trying times, some of these institutions have parlayed considerable investment income into one-year operating surpluses of over a billion dollars. No, that's not a typo; it's a problem every university president would love to have. (Reminder to self