There's only 5407 undergraduates at JHU[1] (for all years). If 10% of those qualify for aid that's 541 in total. Nowhere near 36k people. If we assume a degree takes 4 years, then 137 per year of intake, then those 36k people would be spread over 263 years.

[1] https://apply.jhu.edu/discover-jhu/get-the-facts/

Coincidentally (or not?), Harvard's equivalent program has awarded $1.8B in need-based grants since it was launched in 2005 [1]. Perhaps that gives a rough ballpark of how long this amount of money will last.

[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/03/the-personal-...

Thats 36k people for a year....

Also you probably need to factor in living allowance if supporting underprivileged and once you give a scholarship you're looking at a 3-6 year commitment to that person.

Plus if you want the scholarships to run in perpetuity you can only spend at a rate that keeps the endowment at certain payout rate that does not reduce its value + inflation

So at say 6% being spent a year, divided by $80k to cover tuition and living cost, average 4 year course commitment your looking at 338 new scholarships a year.

That whittles down fast doesn't it....

Or in perpetuity it could be about 4% of 1.8B per year. Which is only 360 students per class though (assuming a 4 year scholarship). Maybe that's 360 kids that wouldn't have otherwise been able to go to Johns Hopkins.

Yeah, sad to see it go to just one university with those kinds of numbers.

Had it been spread to low-cost universities and community colleges, those numbers could have easily been 10x. And wouldn't require the son of a farmer to relocate to one of the highest COL states in the US. Or a daughter from someone in Detroit (went back to find the details of that anecdote and got locked out from paywall).

Hey as long as we're calculating here, let's talk about 1.8B as tax revenue. What tax rate would that be for someone like Bloomberg? Now apply that across the board to everybody making that much, how much tax revenue does it come out to? Extrapolating even further, based on today's split of public money going to education, what would this mean for public school (including universities) funding?