My Spring edition of the Harvard alumni magazine just arrived. It was clearly written before Trump’s assault on the school had reached its current zenith, but the magazine’s spinning away of Harvard’s various ethical transgressions was still in evidence, as it always is.
I found one feature more head-exploding than the rest. An alum of recent vintage mocked a previous issue essay warning that Harvard’s “financial foundations” were “at risk” of being “shattered” because of Trump’s barbarians in Washington breaching the metaphorical gates. Pointing to his alma mater’s approximately 53 billion dollar endowment, the contrarian grad wrote, “Given the general Harvard ethos that taxing the rich is a virtue, you would think that taxing the richest—-Harvard—would be embraced, not cause for alarm. What hypocrisy.”
The editor tit-tutted that the writer was mistaken, because Harvard’s endowment per student was less than some other institutions, such as Princeton. Oh. What a neat way to minimize the size of an massive endowment! Amusingly, another letter in the same issue suggested that Harvard use that device, endowment dollars per student, to combat attacks, stating the endowment as “X dollars per student” rather than cumulatively.
Obviously, the staff adopted the suggestion immediately.
Ethics Alarms 
Looking at Wikipedia, Harvard’s student enrollment was 21,278 in 2023. Dividing $53,000,000,000 by 21,278 gives us…:
$2,490,835.60 per student.
I’m not sure that makes the “we’re in need” argument Harvard desires.
Having worked in financial data analysis for a good chunk of years, I am well aware of lying figures.
Got a story to tell about any kind of data? You can massage whatever you want out of it. Raw numbers look bad? Try percentages. No luck there? Compare year over year, month over month, quarter over quarter. Consolidate or separate entities and redo all the above calculations. Estimate (i.e. make them up) seasonality impacts and redo all the above calculations. Go per capita or per anything that looks better. If all else fails, remove large known factors as one-offs and you can still present whatever story you’re trying to tell.
JunkmailFolder makes excellent points. There are Lies, damn lies and … you get the picture.
Why not compare the size to the number of red doors on campus? It seems the endowment is not something the schools draw down on very much. They endowments are either just points of pride to wave around or potentially, rainy day funds.
Well it’s about to pour down so get busy and convert some to cash.
My eldest is a happy UChicago grad. He received a great education there and is a wonderful, rounded critical thinker who landed a fantastic job as an English major. But he won’t be giving $$$ as an alum. He knows very well they don’t need it.
Many a crook have kept two set of books. Re: $2,490,835.60 per student. i wish i had that available when I attended college. I could have quit the full time job I held supporting myself and my wife while I was a full time student.
Meanwhile, I got to take out a mortgage to afford going to college. Maybe there’s traction to be had in the “forgive student loans” camp if the money is reclaimed from the wretched institutions who pocketed it in the first place.