Pouring Money Into the Ivy League Won’t Solve Its Problems
Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin, a Harvard alumnus, has given more than $500 million to his alma mater over four decades. Now he is pledging $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University. It is the largest individual gift in higher-education history and includes $2 billion for a new Miami campus that CMU says will invert the traditional higher education model, organizing learning around societal challenges rather than majors. That’s exactly what higher education needs: investment in new, competitive experiments.
Higher education is failing students, and the American people are fed up. Seven in 10 Americans, including majorities from both parties, say higher ed is headed in the wrong direction, according to a recent Pew Research poll. Yet in 2025 donors gave nearly $80 billion to colleges and universities. Harvard raised $1.3 billion.
No matter how much money donors throw at the problem, classroom instruction at elite institutions keeps getting worse. In a 2024 survey at Harvard, 45% of students said they were reluctant to share views on controversial topics in class. Sixty percent of grades at Harvard College were A’s in the 2024-25 academic year, up from 24% in 2005-06. That doesn’t sound like an environment of rigorous debate and scholarship.
Under pressure from powerful critics, elite universities have begun to make changes such as adopting statements of institutional neutrality, capping grade inflation, promising to protect open inquiry and establishing civics centers. These changes are cosmetic.
Undergraduate education comprises three elements: students, teachers and classes. If admissions policies, faculty and curriculum don’t improve, administrators haven’t changed anything. They’ve maintained the status quo while trying to deceive the public and get critics off their backs.
For all the Trump administration’s efforts to use federal funding as leverage, elite universities are too wealthy to feel significant pressure from withheld government subsidies. Harvard last reported its endowment at $59.9 billion. In fiscal 2025 the return on the endowment was 11.9%, and the university paid almost no taxes. Administrations at these schools whine about funding cuts because they feel entitled to taxpayer money, but they aren’t hurting.
For the same reason, private donors can’t make much of a difference at these schools. Donations to Ivy League schools get you invitations to cocktail parties and, for the big shots, your name on a building where activist professors who hate you teach classes in which you are the villain.
