Harvard’s Endowment Soars to $53.2B, Reports 33.6% Returns | Hacker News Reader

Harvard’s Endowment Soars to $53.2B, Reports 33.6% Returns

thecrimson.com

16 pointsgmays10 comments

Is that a lot? It appears Yale's endowment grew by 40% [1] and MIT's grew by 55% [2].

Over the same period S&P500 grew by 39%.

[1] https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/10/14/yales-endowment-re...

[2] https://news.mit.edu/2021/mit-put-unexpected-gains-work-imme...

The universities are hedge funds flying below the radar that should “pay their fair share”, not “unrealized gains” by regular people.

No one is really getting rich off of the endowment though. It's not like the endowment pays billions in distributions to the board of trustees or faculty. Sure the guy that manages Harvard's $53.2B is paid $6 million a year (and appears to be worth every penny of it), but face it. If Harvard had no endowment, he'd be on wall street making at least as much anyway. It's not some scheme to enrich him or anyone.

I feel that if I could be 100% certain every dime went to pay for exceptionally talented students to study, full time, for free or to upgrade facilities, I would be less disgruntled.

I don't think that its possible to be even 90% certain of this with our current financial technologies

The bureaucracy would just grow to meet the needs of the growing bureaucracy.

Blockchain can fix this

It would just become the new hedge fund. Perhaps with more autonomy.

As long as it doesn't cost more to administer, but the people are able to track funds better, it will solve the problem.

I don't expect things to be perfect, I just need them to be better.

Harvard should do the right thing, and begin declining donations, or better yet, have a small list of "Harvard approved" deserving schools to give the money to instead. There is no way this school needs to continue reeling in 100M-500M size donations.

But if Harvard declines donations how else are affluent alumni supposed to buy in entrance for their offspring that prefer showing off their exotic vacations on Instagram over studying hard? Harvard exists for children of the ruling class to form strategic lifelong connections that will keep them in the ruling class and keep outsiders out for generations to come. Harvard's recent focus on making admissions more Woke is really only a cover for, "We need an excuse to let more donor children in despite their SAT scores being lower than those of tiger-parented Asians and other groups where parents work hard and sacrifice to get their children ahead."

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