It’s Bad, Really Bad

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Buck Obama

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

‘How Could He Do This To Me?’

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

The ‘Veritas’ About Harvard

The Chronicle:

What happens when the gods of high finance dump a gigantic pile of gold on the richest university in the world?

It sounds like the kind of hypothetical one might pose in a smoke-addled dorm room at 2 a.m. But it is, of course, what actually happened to Harvard University, along with a few of its elite competitors, over the last 20 years.

The answer is that the university reveals its true self. It shows the world what it cares about—and what it doesn’t.

In 1990, Harvard had an endowment of about $4.7-billion. That was still a lot of money, about $7.7-billion in today’s dollars. Only five other universities have that much money now. Over the next two decades the pile grew to colossal heights, $36.9-billion by mid-2008.

Harvard spent the money on many things. But not a dollar went to increasing the number of undergraduates it chose to bless with a Harvard education. In 1990 the university welcomed slightly more than 1,600 students to its freshman class. In 2008, $32-billion later, it enrolled slightly more than 1,600 freshmen.

That is remarkable stinginess. Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable, conferring a lifetime of social capital and prestige. The university receives many more highly qualified applicants than it chooses to admit. Because the existing class includes underqualified children of legacies, rich people, politicians, celebrities, and others who benefit from the questionable Ivy League admissions process, Harvard could presumably increase the size of its entering class by, say, 50 percent while improving the overall academic quality of the students it admits.

Granted, it would cost money to teach more students. The university would need to invest in land and buildings and professors. But that’s precisely what the university spent the endowment on. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences alone expanded by more than 125 positions over the past decade and increased spending by hundreds of millions of dollars. The university gobbled up nearby land and erected a collection of handsome new buildings, creating over six million square feet of new space since 2000 alone. Yet none of the brilliant new people and buildings and land were used to give more undergrads a Harvard education.

Instead, in a fantastic public-relations coup, Harvard announced that it was spending a small fraction of its endowment on making the university more affordable for the upper-middle class. For that, it was praised to the skies for its commitment to opportunity and the egalitarian ideal. Competitors scrambled to follow suit, while also doing little or nothing to serve more undergraduate students.

That’s because the true currency of elite higher education is admissions, not financial aid. And even more than graduate or professional programs, of which Harvard has many, undergraduate education is where colleges decide whether to narrow class divisions or make them wider. Harvard could have used its great fortune to create more spots for deserving low-income students and hire people to fan out across the world and find them. Instead, it spent a little bit of what it had a lot of—money—while jealously hoarding its real store of value…

Read it all:

House Call

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

60 Years

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.