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Comment by nick__m | Hacker News Reader

Elite institutions like MIT, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard do not need more donations.

Look at the worth of theirs endowment funds at the end of 2021 :

  Harvard   53G$
  Yale      42G$
  Stanford  37.8G$
  Princeton 37G$
  MIT       27.4G$

Can you honestly tell me that they need more donations ?

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None of these (and other) schools view endowments as something to spend. It must always be growing to show how amazing and great the school is.

I remember how during the pandemic there was a number of articles about how these schools might have to take out some small pittance of the endowment to fund certain things and the schools were all doom and gloom about it.

Many endowments pay the salary of the fundraisers at major universities, in fact. And legacy gifts are usually set up for "forever" scholarship, where, say 5000 bucks is available for a certain type of student each semester forever, because the gift to the school was large enough that they know investing it will make at least enough to cover the cost.

So no, endowments aren't spent, but the returns fund a lot of stuff.

You don't spend the endowment, you spend the interest.

University of Texas system was around $42B in 2022 : https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-harvard-university-o...

Not all universities are elite

G$ == Giga dollars?

What is G$?

1000 megabucks

1024

I think that’d be gibidollars (Gi$ or something like that?).

All these unusual units are kinda fun, could spice up a presentation or conversation to throw in without context.

It gives me that hacker having fun, tarsnap picodollar/byte-month pricing vibe.

It is the SI prefix for giga, and commonly used instead of B for "Billions" outside of the US when writing "Harvard's endowment fund is currently worth fifty-three billion US dollars".

53G$ == $53B USD

1G$ = 1 000 000 000$

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