All caveats apply. 20≠100, employees might include staff and grad students, etc.
Still, I would never advise anyone to donate to any institution like this.
If you ran MIT, what do you think a good endowment amount per faculty member would be?
I’m not sure $20m is far off from optimal.
I might go down to $15m, with an annual draw down $750k so (5%) per year to cover burdened labor rate of average professor and certain percentage (half?) to go to “support” (i.e., everything else, including libraries, staff, maintenance, maybe grad student funding, etc.). Even that seems sort of on the tight side.
https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...
I couldn’t find the number quickly, but tuition is not a big funding source for the university. They are quite generous with tuition grants. This might not be true for the MBA program, but probably is for many/most other programs.
> … and they didn't receive any research grants.
Yeah. This is where I think one needs to look at exactly where expenses go. Grants don’t go as far as some folks think they do.
Anyway, what’s your number with things being as they are?
I’m still ok with $15-20m, and I am not particularly fond of university admins and the way they run things.
Princeton reported a paltry ~$154.5M in net tuition and fees for FY2023, which seems low ($18K/student.) They claimed $20K "net cost after aid" for students on financial aid.
https://finance.princeton.edu/report-treasurer
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2023/03/31/princeton-trustees...
Being answerable to funding sources, tuition, etc. is a good thing. Having money to soon off from is not.
How can you write "employees might include staff" and keep a straight face? Yes, they do, how is this even in question? MIT has 1089 faculty members but 17,180 employees total. That's a 15x difference.
It's almost all bloat and overhead made possible by being over capitalized.