Adam:
Incredibly, it’s a $45 billion largess during the most recent five-year period.
Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com quantified the federal payments on contracts and grants and special tax treatment of their endowments into the eight schools of the Ivy League plus Stanford University and Northwestern University.
Since 2018, $33 billion of federal contracts and grants flowed to these ten colleges – averaging $6.6 billion annually.
Today, these “educational” non-profits are more federal contractor than they are educator. Their $33 billion in federal contracts and grants outpaced their collection of undergraduate student tuition.
Furthermore, these schools reaped another $12 billion in special tax treatment benefits on the growth of their massive endowment gains (2018-2022). Endowments totaled $237 billion in 2022, up almost $65 billion from $172 billion in 2018.
Since 2017, these colleges are only subject to a 1.4-percent excessive endowments tax and not the 20-percent capital gains tax levied on wealthy Americans.