Mulvaskills

History

Member for

2 years 28 weeks

Recent Comments

Date	Title	Body
2 years 11 weeks ago	What do you mean when you	What do you mean when you write the "professor isn't required to bring in money to pay their salary"? Do you mean the university isn't using tuition to pay that salary? Either way, I'm a bit prone to hyperbole and yes, a university's endowment is in part used for faculty, staff and alumni in ways like you mentioned. My point is that the amount of money spent in those ways is far and away eclipsed by the amount spent on investments. Perhaps more is spent on investment advisors and fund raisers even. I just don't see the educational value of having a university be one of the larger private equity funds in America. I don't have the stats off hand but it wouldn't surprise me if Harvard had a bigger fund than the Carlyle Group. Actually, they're probably investors in the Carlyle Group, so maybe not a good example. To top it all off, they don't pay taxes on their earnings, which makes no sense to me. In fact, i think someone could get elected to Congress in NE running on some endowment fund tax reform platform.
2 years 11 weeks ago	Endowments themselves are	Endowments themselves are peculiar in that they really only exist to be large sums of money, which brings prestige to the University by virtue of the committments (faculty, facilities, etc.) the University can make due to the size of the endowment.  In reality, the endowment isn't used for any of those things but rather is invested in for-profit enterprises (PE Firms, mututal funds, hedge funds, etc.) while not paying taxes on its profits (whole other issue, IMO).  The groups that benefit from the endowment are the individuals in charge of the money, which at UM is the Regents (I believe), the investment office at the school and the various private, for-profit, investment firms that invest the money on their behalf.  If the school wants to build a building or fund a program, rather than use the endowment, it sells the name to a wealthy donor.  See the Ross School of Business.  At Harvard they can't build enough to satisy naming demands of alumni and non-alumni alike.  The point is, the size of the endowment doesn't really benefit the students, faculty or alumni (except in the instance you happen to be one of the investment professionals investing the endowment or are involved in raising the money) other than the ability to brag about it on a message board (no offense).  Though, that brag itself is akin to boasting about the number of core plus office building or bio-tech investments made in the past quarter.  PROTIP: If you are thinking about donating to the endowment fund, consider instead a program, club or other specific donation.
2 years 28 weeks ago	Endowments	But it would be up to the PSU BOT to either cut certain programs (and the corresponding amount of male or female programs) or use their endowment to fund those programs until the athletic department became self-sufficient again.  Endowments themselves are peculiar in that they really only exist to be large sums of money, which bring prestige to the University by virtue of the committments (faculty, facilities, etc.) the University can make due to the size of the endowment.  In reality, the endowment isn't used for any of those things but rather is invested in for-profit enterprises (PE Firms, mututal funds, hedge funds, etc.) while not paying taxes on its profits (whole other issue, IMO).  The groups that benefit from the endowment are the individuals in charge of the money, which at PSU would be the BOT and at UM the Regents (I believe), the investment office at the school and the various private, for-profit, investment firms that invest the money on their behalf.  If the school wants to build a building or fund a program, rather than use the endowment, it sells the name to a wealthy donor.  See the Ross School of Business.  At Harvard they can't build enough to satisy naming demands of alumni and non-alumni alike.  The point is, if PSU is willing to sacrifice some of it's prestige to fund money losing sports, I think that's a small price to pay given the circumstances.  If they don't want to, I suppose that's another type of prestige they're sacrificing but completely up to them.   Post #1.  Huzzah!