Via Larry Solum, an interesting article by Sarah Waldeck on private university endowments in the US. She analyses the data, arguing that it is more informative to look at endowment:expense ratios than absolute endowment sizes (on the ratio ranking, Harvard is #9 and Grinnell #1, whereas on endowment size Harvard is #1 and Grinnell #25). Waldeck points out that taxpayers subsidize these endowments (by giving substantial tax deductions to donors) and suggests that one reason universities benefit from largesse is that they find it easy to absorb large amounts of money and so are attractive to donors. They also, unlike foundations for example, have no obligation to spend the money! She is pretty convincing that there is no good literature defending the accumulation of endowments. But, like Solum, I am a bit skeptical of some of her proposals for taxing and regulating endowments. In particular, in so far as her aim is to lower tuition across the board, that seems a regressive measure: regulating endowments so that they lower tuition ends up reducing the price of an elite education for children of the wealthy (most of these schools already have incredibly low true tuition for children from non-wealthy families). Solum:
I found the populist, rich versus poor rhetoric of the paper puzzling. If distributive justice is the goal, then forcing tuition cuts at elite universities is likely to undermine rather than contribute to the goal. Tuition subsidies to students at elite universities subsidize the rich–even when the scholarships are targeted at low income students. If the notion is to produce wealth equality between universities, then I am simply mystified: what possible reason of political morality would justify that as a goal?
Waldeck doesn’t make a case that the large endowments do any real harm. I suppose that the foregone tax revenues could be used better by the government, but its not clear that they would be. At one point she suggests that big donors would give to other worthy causes if they weren’t giving to universities, but I’d like to see evidence. Universities seem at least as valuable as art galleries and opera houses; and Waldeck doesn’t propose a systematic revamping of the tax deduction so that it only rewards donations to institutions that promote distributive justice, or anything like that.
I’m curious what people think about the particular good that Solum suggests research universities produce:
Mega-endowments are held by major research universities that play a major role in promoting the production of knowledge–much of which is in the form of “ideas” in the technical sense (that is, new information that cannot be protected by intellectual property). Creating stable institutions that that invest in the creation of knowledge and make decisions on the basis of academic values and are not responsive to the steering mechanisms of the market or the system of electoral politics is, I would argue, a very great social good. Pace Waldeck (and Hansmann on whom she relies), I should think that the concern for preservation of a culture of knowledge is well justified and hence that the “rainy day” and “intergenerational” arguments are well-founded. I certainly saw no persuasive criticisms in this article.
Maybe. It’s very hard to know what all the effects would be of, for example, cutting university numbers by 50%. But I worry sometimes that mass higher education has hidden costs, like for example, drawing people (like me, frankly) who really ought to be k-12 teachers into the professoriate, thus harming schools. (Since I was 15 being a teacher was the only thing I seriously considered, and I certainly would have taught in compulsory education if I hadn’t had the opportunities I did for continued study and, eventually, a career).
But its always seemed to me that, given the fact of mass education, the highly-endowed private institutions yield a benefit for at least the flagship public universities, which is that they give us a bit more independence from legislatures than we might otherwise enjoy. State legislators maintain flagship universities as well as they do, and with as little interference as they impose, partly because there is a significant constituency who want to have elite higher education available for their children on the cheap (i.e., without having to pay the private tuition that they could, at a pinch, afford). To maintain the reputations of their flagships, legislators have to compete, at some level, with the elite private institutions, which are independent of legislators. In order to do this they have to offer reasonable salaries, but more tellingly they have to guarantee some measure of academic freedom in excess of what they might prefer. If that story is right (and no doubt some of our readers know more about the politics of this that I do, it wouldn’t be hard!) then we (in the elite public institutions, like Solum and me) benefit from the need to compete with the independent privates.
Anyway, read Waldeck’s paper and Solum’s comments, and discuss here since he doesn’t have comments open.
{ 25 comments }
lemuel pitkin 06.05.08 at 8:26 pm
I suppose that the foregone tax revenues could be used better by the government, but its not clear that they would be.
Wait, no. Stop right there.
Tax equity is an important principle both on equity and efficiency grounds. Unless there is some compelling reason to do otherwise, we should tax similar individuals/organizations/activities at the same rate. The disparity between the taxes paid by universities and by similar-sized businesses can only be justified if you think universities are providing a distinct social ebenfit. Now I think they do, and the paragraph you quote from Soulm does a good job describing it, but you have to make the case. You can’t just dismiss the revenue loss this way.
And given that many wealthy private universities are located in depressed urban areas, their exemption from property taxes in particular *is* probably depriving local governments of revenue that might be very well-spent at the margin. Do we really think that another dollar to Yale produces more value than a dollar to the New Haven public schools?
lemuel pitkin 06.05.08 at 9:01 pm
OK, Now I’ve read the Waldeck piece.
As far as I can tell, Waldeck does *not* advocate “forcing tution cuts at elite universities” — that’s Slocum’s invention. In fact, she discusses the exact opposite approach, using taxes on mega-endowments to fund tution reductions at poorer institutions.
Her point, rather, is that the resources represented by endowments and their favorable tax treatment are misallocated from the point of view of advancing the social goals of universities (which, it’s true, she does seem to conceive of mainly as education rather than research.)
Endowments are misallocated, first, between universities, from their concentration at a handful of elite schools. Slocum says he is “mystified” by the suggestion that equalizing resources between universities should even be a goal. But it would seem to follow quite naturally from the idea that there are declining returns to spending on higher education — the next dollar at the University of Massachusetts is liekly to be spent on a more critical educational need than the next dollar at Harvard. (Again, if you reject the premise that the purpose of elite universities is to provide education, this argument is weaker.)
Second, they are misallocated within instiutions because universities don’t use their endowmnets sufficiently to advance their social mission — whetehr this is mainly education or research (or something else.) For a variety of reasons, they prefer to accumualte assets rather than do more of whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing. If they faced incentives to spend endowmnet gifts mroe rapidly, or donors faced incentives to channel their gifts toward the university’s core mission, the resources of the endowment and foregone taxes would be spent more efficiently.
Finally, I would suggest that if you want to protect the funding and autonomy of public universities, you’d do better to work for that directly through the political system, and not through huge subsidies to their wealthy private competitors.
harry b 06.05.08 at 9:04 pm
solum, not slocum!!! Very different.
more later.
harry b 06.05.08 at 9:20 pm
She says “critics of endowment policies want universities to use more of their endowments to help off-set the cost of an education†(p6) and the suggested 5% rule and 990 revisions seem specifically designed to have this effect. Its true that she thinks mega-endowment universities spending on physical plant etc may cause tuition to be raised at other institutions as they compete for students by getting fancier physical plant. But for these institutions too (mine, Solum’s) most of the students are from advantaged backgrounds and destined for advantaged backgrounds and lower tuition simply increases their net expected lifetime income, so it is not desirable on distributive justice grounds. The efficiency points are different and well taken.
I agree, btw about exemptions from real estate tax: the article and my comments are specifically about Federal tax policy.
I don;t especially want to protect funding of state elite universities (that is, I want to protect their funding, but not the state subsidy, which is highly regressive); I do want to protect their independence to some extent, and this is easier to do (through politics which is, I agree, the only way) when they are in competition with independent privates.
lemuel pitkin 06.05.08 at 9:41 pm
Oops, Solum, right.
You are right that students at poorer universities are likely to be from relatively advtaged backgrounds. But redistribution from the very top to the upper-middle is still progressive. And note that another way universities could increase their spending on education is by increasing enrollment.
In general, though, I think — and it seems you agree — that her strongest argument is that extremely large endowments of certain schools suggested the tax subsidies they receive are not efficient ways to produce the desired social benefit.
Look at it this way: What do we think when we see a corporation sitting on a big pile of cash? Generally, that it doesn’t see any good investment or expansion opportunities in its line of business. And society does, in fact, often respond to this by redistributing its resoruces to someone else who *can* find a use for them — not so much through the tax system, as because such companies are attractive targets for hostile takeovers and activist shareholders.
In the same way, the disproportionate size and growth rate of the endowments at places like Harvard and Grinnell suggest that they don’t see any good opportunities to scale up their education and research. Or that they place a low priority on those functions, which comes to the same thing — either way, it’s hard to justify subidizing them at the same scale as instutitions that are more tightly constrained by their finances.
F 06.05.08 at 10:48 pm
I think a very strong argument can be made that education is not, in fact, the major purpose or outcome of elite public universities. Most of the undergraduate students that pass through these institutions are in the process of accumulating credentials rather than actually learning, or at least much more so than any private institution. From an output point of view, research is clearly the major product of these schools.
lemuel pitkin 06.05.08 at 11:39 pm
a very strong argument can be made that education is not, in fact, the major purpose or outcome of elite universities.
Right. And this greatly weakens the inter-university component of Waldeck’s argument. There’s a fairly strong presumption that per-student educational expenditures should be roughly equal, on both equity and efficiency grounds. But there’s no such presumption for research spending.
There is still the within-university issue, though. Suppose endowments are funds to support research. Well then, we would expect a reasonable amount of the endowment to actually be spent for that purpose. If too little is, and instead the endowment returns are simply reinvested, then we have to conclude that either (a) the university can’t find any useful research to fund or (b) the endowment is really intended for some other purpose, like accumulation for its own sake.
As another version of this argument put it, when the expense ratio passes a certain point a kind of ground-figure reversal takes place: what had previously looked like a school with some investments starts to look like an investment fund with a school-shaped fundraising/PR department.
Lord Acton 06.05.08 at 11:47 pm
No doubt the vast majority of Harvard Professors would favor taxing the wealthiest Americans so as the aid the poorest Americans.
How could they possible be against taxing the wealthiest Universities so as to aid the poorest Universities?
After all, aren’t poor Universities that way only because of discrimination or an unfounded bias?
F 06.05.08 at 11:49 pm
And this greatly weakens the inter-university component of Waldeck’s argument. There’s a fairly strong presumption that per-student educational expenditures should be roughly equal, on both equity and efficiency grounds. But there’s no such presumption for research spending.
This is exactly my greatest criticism as well. If you look at the two adjusted measures (endowment:expense and endowment:students) and see where they differ most, it’s exactly the research-heavy schools. So when she says that they’re basically equivalent, and so we should use endowment/student because it’s easier, she majorly screws over places with few students but larger research expenditures, like Caltech and MIT.
Of course you are right that research needs to be a reasonable percentage of endowment funds. My impression is that this is usually the case, but I would welcome more data.
Public universities can also make the argument that a big endowment is another way to make up for the fact that governments at all levels have really failed to adequately fund higher education across the board. Of course, to use this argument, they would again have to demonstrate that they are spending significant amounts of the endowment to fund operations. I’d be thrilled to see schools spend more of their endowments on research-related things. It would be one way to make up for the drop of funding of such things by the government.
F 06.05.08 at 11:52 pm
After all, aren’t poor Universities that way only because of discrimination or an unfounded bias?
Insofar as the funding of universities, like personal income, is a big game of asshole (the best get more, the worst get less), there is an argument to be made for redistribution. However, I think that it is more true for universities than it is for individuals that the level of income is representative of their overall merit, and so redistribution makes less sense.
Leon 06.06.08 at 12:03 am
From an international perspective, it’s worth noting that many (most?) countries don’t have strong private higher ed. traditions like the US does. It may be a fairly fragile custom.
christian h. 06.06.08 at 12:07 am
Private university endowments are (a) part of a much larger problem: namely that our tax system encourages large-scale charity, that is, giving the mega-rich the right to decide how the income they derive from exploiting worker’s labor should be spent; and (b), a huge problem with the endowments is that they encourage the transformation of universities into profit centers, as the “success” of them is measured in… contributions.
These reasons alone convince me that the endowments existing now should be expropriated into one public fund that can then be used to support research and higher education according to democratic control; and all future contributions should be taxed.
georgiana 06.06.08 at 2:01 am
Another related issue is the ridiculous sums most elite universities now charge for tuition, a chunk of which is paid through subsidized student loans. So not only are they sitting on endowments fostered by a tax-favored situation, their current income also heavily relies on government subsidies. One possibility (even though as others point out, the endowment is probably not for education) is requiring private universities to self-fund their student loans or provide scholarships to some level based on their endowment before they can receive monies from gov’t backed loans.
a 06.06.08 at 5:14 am
What christian h. said.
gr 06.06.08 at 5:24 am
“Creating stable institutions that that invest in the creation of knowledge and make decisions on the basis of academic values and are not responsive to the steering mechanisms of the market or the system of electoral politics is, I would argue, a very great social good.”
Let’s assume this is true. Still raises the question whether endowments are the only way to create such institutions. It seems to me the answer is pretty clearly ‘no’. After all, many countries that don’t have private universities do have institutions of higher education that seem to match Solum’s description.
Dan Simon 06.06.08 at 5:44 am
The problem, to my mind, is that the quality and value of “the particular good that Solum suggests research universities produce” is directly decided by the faculties of research universities themselves. Needless to say, this is a very poor incentive structure. Indeed, when it gets created in corporate boards of directors, it’s widely recognized (by Crooked Timber readers and bloggers, at least) as a recipe for disaster.
There are in fact many ways in which this kind of self-policing can go wrong. Conservatives argue most frequently about capture by political partisans, since that is the problem they’re most concerned about. But non-political problems such as corruption, mismanagement, inefficiency and cronyism are similarly damaging–and, I suspect, far more rampant than most academics care to admit. After all, when an organization has the largely unregulated power to manage an enormous endowment pretty much as it sees fit, within very broad limits encompassing every imaginable “legitimate academic purpose”, one shouldn’t be surprised if its decisions aren’t always motivated solely by a commitment to intellectual and academic excellence.
Z 06.06.08 at 8:23 am
the quality and value of “the particular good that Solum suggests research universities produce†is directly decided by the faculties of research universities themselves.
You misunderstand. The quality is judged by (generally) anonymous referees from competing universities. You are not so much judged by your peers than by your competitors, and they have a vested interest in finding your work flawed, not correct. This does not mean the system is perfect, but the principle is very good and in no way comparable of a corporation devising its own accounting techniques (if that is the analogy you had in mind).
Brett Bellmore 06.06.08 at 10:52 am
“that is, giving the mega-rich the right to decide how the income they derive from exploiting worker’s labor should be spent;”
LOL! And the best part is, you probably don’t think there’s any need for you to prove that’s where they derive their income, before dictating to them where it’s spent.
I think the best way to approach this is to note that, whatever universities are accumulating endowments for, the purpose ultimately has to involve spending money. The endowment isn’t just a Scrooge McDuck money pool for the trustees to swim in. It’s there to be spent.
So it’s fair enough that at some point we as them to start spending it, or take away the special tax status that’s assisting them in piling the gold bars higher.
Slocum 06.06.08 at 12:20 pm
“solum, not slocum Very different.”
Right — Slocum is the one sending his kid to a flagship public school ‘on the cheap’. On the cheap being ~$17K/year rather than ~$40K. BTW, if you aspire to sending your kid to a private university, don’t do what we did — don’t live below your means and save, because this will lead universities to conclude (via FAFSA) that all your savings are belong to us. If, instead, you send your kids to private K-12 schools and otherwise spend yourself to the limit of your means (say on luxury cars and a McMansion or two), you’ll get back a big chunk of the money you blew in the form of a nice discount off retail tuition rates.
There were probably ways to hide the savings, but because of Krueger and Dale, Slocum doesn’t worry much about depriving the kid.
As for Harvard and it’s endowment–I’d recommend that the trustees find some socially beneficial way of spending the money other than new buildings and highly subsidized tuition for the upper middle class. Otherwise, well, they don’t really expect the cash-hungry state legislature to leave that big old pile of money (or is that a big pile of old money) alone indefinitely, do they? And the more success Harvard has in fund-raising and investing, the more attractive it makes itself as a target.
harry b 06.06.08 at 1:03 pm
The Krueger and Dale study not only assures slocum about his kid, but also suggests that for the moment, it doesn’t matter that much if capable kids from the lower orders (that is, from the lower-than-incredibly-high orders) can’t get into places like Harvard, as long as they can go to places like Madison or wherever slocum’s kid goes.
slocum’s depressing comment about the incentives built into financial aid is also true, and worth a subsequent post (slocum, I notice that I almost always agree with you when the topic of higher ed comes up!)
lemuel pitkin 06.06.08 at 2:29 pm
At the end of the day, I agree with Christian H and (by implication) Leon that the social function of endowments would be better achieved by direct public support for universities.
But Waldeck is operating in a framework where endowments are a major way the long-term stability and autonomy of universities is preserved, and where the tax treatment of endowments is a major form of public support for universities. And it seems clear that even within that framework endowments could do more to support teaching and research.
christian h. 06.06.08 at 2:41 pm
brett, if you want to fool yourself into believing that the Rockefellers of this world made their money through hard work and ingenuity, that’s not my problem. I don’t approve of forcing people to abandon their comforting delusions.
Dan Simon 06.06.08 at 3:37 pm
You misunderstand. The quality is judged by (generally) anonymous referees from competing universities.
…Much the way corporate boards are typically drawn from “competing” corporations’ top management. Without oversight that’s external to this whole system, the opportunities for logrolling become irresistible.
Nell 06.07.08 at 9:34 pm
They also, unlike foundations for example, have no obligation to spend the money
The money-spending requirements on foundations to spend their money are minimal. I’d bet that most college/university endowments spend a higher percentage of the fund than foundations do.
dan k 06.09.08 at 1:40 pm
One useful element missing from the paper is a categorization of the various universities. Rockefeller University is primarily a research institution and doesn’t even have an undergraduate program. Several arguments that apply to the Ivies and liberal arts colleges topping the endowment per full-time student list don’t apply to research institutions.
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