A cursory view of articles on that subject reveal it’s not so cut and dried. many schools with large endowments give only a small amount to reduce student costs, much of it goes to salaries, hiring positions, infrastructure. It varies but your post doesn’t address the main point, which is with billions of dollars in endowments, why isn’t more of the funding going to reduce student/cost/debt ?
Just in 2016, “experts I consulted estimate that over $100 billion of educational endowment money nationwide is invested in hedge funds, costing them approximately $2.5 billion in fees in 2015 alone.”
This calls into question how beneficial these institutions are for students as opposed to the private equity barons running them. As Julien Berman of the Harvard Crimson
wrote, “In 2014, five rich institutions including Harvard paid more to private equity fund managers than they dished out in aid to their entire student bodies.” Meanwhile, another study Berman noted found that endowment increases have no effect on tuition. In other words, Harvard getting more money is not making it any more affordable.
Tax free
