Friday, September 11, 2009

Harvard Endowment Plunges by 27%

Harvard's endowment fell 27.3 percent, or roughly $11 billion, over the last fiscal year, the Harvard Crimson is reporting.

The decline brought the value of the endowment as of June 30 down to $26 billion—on par with 2005 levels—after reaching almost $37 billion in 2008.

Maybe Harvard money managers should be reading EPJ instead of the Harvard Business Review.

The unprecedented drop has dramatic ramifications for Harvard's schools, some of which rely on annual payments from the endowment for more than half their income. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the University's largest school and home of Harvard College, drew 52 percent of its revenues from the endowment last year. Planning for a precipitous drop in endowment size has already resulted in $77 million in budget cuts at FAS, and administrators are looking to cut another $143 million this year from a budget of just over $1 billion, The Crimson continued.

1 comment:

  1. Wenzel,

    The Harvard Business Review reads like the World Worker's Daily. Honest to god, one of my managers tossed me a copy (innocently enough... he prides himself on being a 'hip' boss and probably doesn't read too deeply in the mag, more content to just have it on his desk where others can see it)a few weeks ago. One of the first articles I read was by a Yale FORESTRY SCHOOL professor, talking about doing business in a 'post-industrial world' and all the need for public-private compromise and teamwork. He said that in the new era of the 'no-growth' economy proper legislation, welfare programs, jobs training and other govt stimulus efforts will ensure that we can all spread what little wealth remains and still prosper.

    This was from the "new ideas" section of the Harvard BUSINESS Review. Most anti-business thing I've read since picking up the latest copy of Anti-Business Week magazine.

    Absolutely, totally full of every bad socialist cliche out there. One of those things that was so nauseatingly thick with the stuff that it would require a whole book to debunk the two-page article. I swear, that seems to be the socialists strategy nowadays, just pen the most erroneous, chock-full-o-lies-and-illogical-nonsense piece you can, stuff every moral platitude and 'my god, the children man, THE CHILDREN!' outrage you can and then watch the libertarians work themselves into such a tizzy trying to unwind it all that they asphyxiate in the effort.

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