Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

"In 2017–18, Stanford is a $6.3 billion enterprise." http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/finances

Takes a lot of people to manage that much money.

That's nonsense, and taking one look at basically any fund manager will tell you otherwise. Just to give the most outrageous counterexample, the sovereign wealth fund of Norway employs 550 people and manages $1 trillion in assets, including 1.3% of all global stocks.

https://www.nbim.no/en/organisation/about-us/

Given the content of the link nikanj provided, it makes more sense to interpret “Takes a lot of people to manage that much money,” not literally, but rather as meaning “Takes a lot of people to run an organization that big.”

From the link:

In 2017–18, Stanford is a $6.3 billion enterprise. This figure represents the university’s consolidated budget for operations, a compilation of all annual operating and restricted budgets that support teaching, scholarship and research, including the budgets of all schools and administrative areas and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. It does not include the $1 billion capital budget and excludes the budget for Stanford Health Care and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.

Berkshire Hathaway has 25 office staff: http://www.businessinsider.fr/us/berkshire-hathaway-omaha-of...

"It's well-known that Berkshire Hathaway keeps a small headquarters with these 25 staffers, who manage some of the most important affairs of this $329 billion company."

I don't think you need that many people to manage $6.3 billions.

Also, I worked at a hedge fund managing $12 billions and we were ~150 (but this is a completely different job than what staffers at Stanford or Berkshire Hathaway are doing)

I work for a research institution not as big as Stanford, and there is a lot of work that needs to be done to provide education, from the office staff needed to generate reports for regulators and accrediting bodies, to the marketing staff, to IT staff, to financial aid admissions and other officers, to security, to the janitors .... People don't realize how much work and man power it takes to put one professor in the classroom, or to keep the hospital open that is tied to the institution.

Also, many institutions have a vast portfolio of real estate. This takes more man power to manage that a similarly valued portfolio of financial instruments traded on wall street.

Vanguard manages over $4 trillion with only 1600 employees.

They have 16,600 employees, with $5.1 trillion under management. They only have 400 funds, which typically would have just one or two fund managers. That's a ratio of 20:1 admin staff to fund managers, assuming two fund managers per fund.

> Endowment: $24.785 billion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...

I think they put it there to realize Stanford mission is not to educate future businessman and women, scholars etc. Their main business is making hard core cash. Which obviously should not be a mission of educational platform. And thats why you need so many helpers running around.

Frankly its truly disgusting that they will make their students invent stuff that they patent and sale, and also kae them pay tuition for that. And of course Stanford is not an exception; MIT makes even bigger buck!

If american healthcare system is not a total rip off and fraud to you, then look no further than american educational system.

If american healthcare system is not a total rip off and fraud to you, then look no further than american educational system.

I have a CS bachelors degree from UC Berkeley. IIRC that cost me around $4,000 per year. I don’t believe that I was ripped off or defrauded.

“America educational system” is way too broad of a target. Unless you feel that I was ripped off and defrauded without my knowledge...

Yet somehow Stanford is quite reputable and desired university, so they know how to use the money they have to be one of best in educating/research. So you can't assume they are wasteful, otherwise other units should outcompete them, right? Unless system is very rigid... I don't know - I'm not from US

More like: it takes a lot of people to justify budget and tuition increases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com