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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

This is incredibly shortsighted. The point of an endowment is not to pay it off, the point is that the endowment persists indefinitely, and the interest / returns fund operations.

If people wanted to contribute directly to a university, they can. Instead they're contributing to the endowment. Respect that choice.

It's pathetic that universities have actually set up a sustainable source for funding scholarships etc indefinitely -- where spending caps are actually restricted -- and the vultures immediately descend to suck it dry and spend it off. And then in a few decades when it's gone: ???

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What if university endowments were used to fund research and implementation into ways to drive down the cost of education to zero?

The internet has already driven the cost of education to zero, what schools are really selling are degrees. Anyways, Yale only spends $170 million on tuition assistance, but in reality ; Yale covers full tuition and housing costs for students who's family income is less than $200,000.

> The internet has already driven the cost of education to zero [...]

For things like CS, sure - mostly. Excepting for slightly niche areas like embedded programming, you can achieve similar experience for $0.

But for most other [engineering] degrees, this isn't true. You can't tape out a custom integrated circuit (IC) for free, but this is something some EE undergrads get to do at brand-name universities. Even the licensing cost of the software used to design those ICs can reach six figures.

I imagine there are similar things with chemistry, material science students and especially medical students.

But yeah, even in those other engineering fields, the internet has reduced the cost of education.

Pray tell me how one can use the internet to get a zero-cost education to prepare one for, say, a career in experimental physics. It turns out that you need some actual hand-on experience with some non-virtual equipment to do a lot of things in the real world...

Because whatever the idea is, it probably won't work and then there wont be free education or any money.

I find your comment ironic on a forum sponsored by an entity that funds "creative destruction" of existing market spaces.

Endowment funds are accrued through donations. The vast majority of donors would have no interest in giving money towards operational costs; they are interested in something that can be seen as a legacy.

Like edX?

You're assuming that the return on investing in the students, in whatever form, would be less than the endowment returns. The endowment money doesn't come from nothing, and, frankly, the larger your endowment gets, the more likely you are going to just revert to the standard market return, and the more beneficial it would be to invest in your students.

It's not the cut and dry issue you seem to be implying.

>It's pathetic that universities have actually set up a sustainable source for funding scholarships etc indefinitely

You are talking about endowments? Ha.

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