Glenn Reynolds: As former Labor secretary Robert Reich recently noted, Ivy League schools are government-subsidized playgrounds for the rich: “Imagine a system of college education supported by high and growing government spending on elite private universities that mainly educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class, and low and declining government spending on public universities … Continue reading To reduce inequality, abolish Ivy League Subsidies →

Paul Caron: The tax applies to any private college or university that has at least 500 full-time tuition-paying students (more than half of whom are located in the U.S.) and that has assets other than those used in its charitable activities worth at least $500,000 per student. An estimated 40 or fewer institutions are affected. … Continue reading UniveRsity endowments > $500,000 per student taxed at 1.4%, Ivy League Billion dollar subsiDies →

Open the books: KEY FINDINGS: 1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year. 2. The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments … Continue reading Ivy League Summary: Tax Break Subsidies And Government Payments →

Sidney K. Lee and Thomas J. Mete Harvard spent $530,000 on lobbying the federal government in 2023, the lowest amount spent by the University in the past nine years. While collective Ivy League federal lobbying expenditures surged by 12.4 percent last year, reaching an all time high during the Biden administration, Harvard’s own lobbying levels … Continue reading Ivy League Federal Lobbying Expenditure Rose 12% in 2023, Harvard Spent $530,000 →

Adam Andrzejewski The auditors at OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit government-spending watchdog which I direct, examined 10 universities—the Ivy League, plus Stanford and Northwestern. We found that during a five-year period from 2018-22 these wealthy universities collected $45 billion in taxpayer subsidies, special tax treatment, and federal payments. In fact, these universities collected a stunning $33 billion in federal … Continue reading The U.S. tax code and federal contracts swell the coffers of wealthy Ivy League universities that teach hatred is OK. Taxpayers should cut them off. →

Michael Walsh: What if we follow his lead, then, and abolish not the monasteries — the current incarnation of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church is taking care of that all by itself — but the Ivy League and a few other “elite” universities, the nests of “progressive” saboteurs who have inflicted incalculable damage on the … Continue reading Make Like Henry: Dissolve the Ivy League →

Edward Luce: If Rome’s oligarchs could have travelled to the future, they might have learned a trick or two from the US Ivy League. It is hard to think of a better system of elite perpetuation than that practised by America’s top universities. Last week the US Supreme Court ended affirmative action in US higher … Continue reading The moral bankruptcy of Ivy League America →

Evan Mandery: To some extent, elite colleges are simply collateral damage in the culture war. Indeed, the thrust of Vance’s speech is about the need to break through the indoctrination of the liberal intelligentsia — via what he calls “red pilling,” a reference to The Matrix — where the “fundamental corruption” at the root of the system, … Continue reading Ivy League Commentary →

Jack Cashill: The one obvious clue that President Joe Biden did notattend an Ivy League University is this: When busted for plagiarism, Biden suffered real-world consequences. In a 1987 Democratic primary debate, while very much a viable candidate, Biden famously lifted a passage from a speech by Neil Kinnock, the former leader of Britain’s Labour … Continue reading “In an age of declining academic rigor” If the Ivy League is to plagiarism what the SEC is to football, then Harvard is its Alabama, often the champ, always a contender. →

Arnold Kling: The Moonshot Goal This white paper depicts an alternative form of higher education that will rely heavily on people who participate in and support the world of profit-seeking businesses. The goal is to displace the Ivy League. Success will mean that In five years, a survey will find that a majority of middle-class … Continue reading An attempt to displace the Ivy League →

If Judge Jackson is confirmed the SCOTUS will consist of 4 Harvard Law grads and 4 Yale Law grads, plus 1 Notre Dame Law grad. (Justice Amy Barrett = diversity.) It will have 3 Princeton undergrads, 2 from Harvard, and 1 each from Yale, Georgetown, Holy Cross, and Rhodes College. — Robert P. George🇻🇦🇺🇸🪕 (@McCormickProf) … Continue reading Civics: Governance and Ivy League influence →

Sophie Mann: This week, our award is going to the United States Congress for allocating nearly $170 million  for emergency funding to be distributed among Ivy League universities, some with endowments larger than the total assets managed by some mid-size investment funds. The most recent “coronavirus relief bill” cost just under $2 trillion, placing significant upward … Continue reading Ivy League received $168 million from Congress during third round of ‘relief’ funding →

Andrew Kerr and Mary Margaret Olohan: The Ivy League is comprised of eight elite private colleges that control endowments with a combined value of over $140 billion as of 2019. Five of the schools reported operational surpluses of over $200 million in their 2019 financial statements. The eight elite schools are set to receive a … Continue reading Ivy League Universities Flush With Cash Set To Receive Millions In Federal Coronavirus Funding →

Kristine E. Guillaume and Jamie D. Halper: Harvard just beat Harvard’s own fundraising record — in a major way. The University closed out its capital campaign at $9.6 billion, officials announced Thursday morning, meaning the school surpassed its original goal — already representing the highest amount ever raised by a single institute of higher education … Continue reading Harvard Raises $9.6 Billion in Final Capital Campaign Tally, Smashing Its Own Fundraising Record; federal taxpayer subsidies continue… →

Ethan Beeman: The Christian legal group has won nine Supreme Court cases in the past seven years, including Masterpiece Cakeshop. That’s the case where seven justices said Colorado showed “religious hostility” to cake designer Jack Phillips when it found that his refusal to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding violated the state’s antidiscrimination law. … Continue reading Civics: First Amendment, taxpayer subsidies and the Yale Law School →

Nicholas Kristof: The larger problem is that 38 colleges, including five from the Ivy League, had more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent. Over all, children from the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to attend Ivy League colleges than children from the bottom 20 percent. When … Continue reading “38 colleges, including five from the Ivy League, had more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent” →

Alicia McElhaney: Members of the House of Representatives introduced a bipartisan bill Thursday to eliminate the new excise tax on university endowments. The bill, sponsored by Reps. John Delaney (D-Md.) and Bradley Byrne (R-Al.), would repeal the 1.4 percent excise tax under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by President Donald Trump in December. … Continue reading Taxpayer Subsidies for massive college endowments →

David Sirota and Josh Keefe: During his successful quest to win Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, Donald Trump told the state’s voters that colleges are fleecing taxpayers and enriching Wall Street. “What a lot of people don’t know is that universities get massive tax breaks for their massive endowments,” he told a crowd in suburban Philadelphia. … Continue reading Why Do Ivy League Schools Get Tax Breaks? How The Richest US Colleges Get Richer →

Documents: Plaintiffs, Sia Henry, Michael Maerlander, Brandon Piyevsky, Kara Saffrin, and BrittanyTatiana Weaver, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated, bring this class actionunder Section 1 of the Sherman Act against Brown University (“Brown”), California Institute ofTechnology (“CalTech”), University of Chicago (“Chicago”), The Trustees of ColumbiaUniversity in the City of New York (“Columbia”), … Continue reading Universities Antitrust Lawsuit →

Joey Garrison and Maria Puente: Actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin and nine college coaches are among the 50 people charged Tuesday in what federal officials say is the nation’s largest-ever college admissions bribery case prosecuted by the Justice Department. The Justice Department charged 33 affluent parents, which include CEOs and television stars, with taking … Continue reading Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin among 50 indicted in largest-ever case alleging bribery to get kids into colleges →

Bill Ackman: Imagine that you and your family borrowed the $360k it costs for four years at @Columbia plus interest at today’s rates. Regardless of your religious or ethnic background, is this what you signed up for? Private university mismanagement also begs the question as to why private universities should have the benefit of a … Continue reading Why should Americans who don’t go to college or who attend lower cost public universities be subsidizing high-cost private universities, their endowments, and their poisonous ideologies? →

Noah Smith: You probably thought this was going to be a post about the controversy over the university presidents who recently gave disastrous Congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus, and the big donors who have been trying to get them fired. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but it’s not really about that — or at least, only tangentially. … Continue reading “Donations to elite universities are sending money to where it’s needed least — to lavish yet more dollars on a very small number of kids who already have the best dorms, the best professors, the best student services, & so on” →

Adam Andrzejewski: BACKGROUND: Stanford University was the biggest recipient of federal funds over the past five years. It counted more than $7 billion. It received more than any of the Ivies, and Northwestern. Only Dartmouth received less than $1 billion in federal contracts and grants. Most of the funds – roughly $29 billion (88-percent) versus … Continue reading Wealthy, Elite Universities Like Harvard Taxed You $45 Billion In Last Five Years →

by Rahem D Hamid, Nia L Orakwue, and Elias J. Schisgall arvard President Claudine Gay is facing allegations of plagiarism after a report in the Washington Free Beacon on Monday and a Sunday post on Substack claimed she plagiarized portions of four academic works over 24 years, including her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard. The … Continue reading Harvard Corporation Breaks Silence, Stating Support for Gay While Addressing Plagiarism Allegations →

Tyler Cowen Here is three and a half minutes of their testimony before Congress.  Worth a watch, if you haven’t already.  I have viewed some other segments as well, none of them impressive.  I can’t bring myself to sit through the whole thing. I don’t doubt that I would find their actual views on world affairs highly … Continue reading The well endowed university Presidents →

The Penn Wharton Budget Model’s largest supporter is the CEO of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. The former CEO of Microsoft and an Enron/hedge fund trader are the other two. Really great piece about how Washington works.https://t.co/pLNbTyOuJa — David Dayen (@ddayen) April 10, 2023 related: KEY FINDINGS: 1. Ivy League payments and entitlements … Continue reading Government, influence, grant and higher education industrial complex: Penn edition →

students, schmoodents. from 2020-22, yale university received more money just in HHS grants than from all student tuition, room, and board payments combined. but sure kids, keep thinking “you’re the customer”… pic.twitter.com/P0EUwvA7q2 — el gato malo (@boriquagato) February 25, 2023 Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This … Continue reading The “grant industrial complex” →

Glenn Reynolds It was an important, if not especially proud, moment for Columbia — but it was surely a bigger moment in the lives of those West Harlem business owners, as their property gets taken away to promote the “vision” of what is, in fact, a multibillion-dollar corporation servicing the daughters and sons of the … Continue reading Columbia vs the little guy →

Nick Burns: It’s that the campus setup makes it easy for them to forget that reasonable people often don’t share their outlook. Student bodies and faculties have grown more diverse in recent decades, but that shouldn’t fool us into thinking elite universities have become microcosms of society: The highly educated are far more liberal than … Continue reading Taxpayer Subsidized Universities are out of touch… →

Andrew Van Damm: In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts. … Continue reading Notes on elite dominance in academia →

Bloomberg: Harvard University, the richest U.S. college, is forecasting a revenue shortfall of nearly $1.2 billion over two academic years, showing how the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic are crippling schools. Harvard faces a drop of $415 million in anticipated revenue for the year ending June 30, and a further $750-million shortfall compared to … Continue reading Harvard Sees $1.2 Billion Revenue Shortfall Due to Pandemic →

Rick Sobey: Harvard University, backed by a $40 billion endowment, is facing criticism for taking in nearly $9 million from the coronavirus relief package. All of the money is helping Harvard students with financial assistance, but some politicians are urging the Cambridge university to return the money to the federal government. Harvard “now adds insult … Continue reading Harvard under fire for accepting more than $8M in coronavirus relief package →

Erin O’Donnell: RAPIDLY INCREASING number of American families are opting out of sending their children to school, choosing instead to educate them at home. Homeschooled kids now account for roughly 3 percent to 4 percent of school-age children in the United States, a number equivalent to those attending charter schools, and larger than the number … Continue reading Anti-Homeschooling Rhetoric; “we know best” →

David Freeman: Nobody looks to the Ivy League for balanced political discourse. But a new report suggests that on at least one campus, the stifling of conservative views among faculty members is nearly complete. Valerie Pavilonis and Matt Kristoffersen report in the Yale Daily News: According to computer science professor David Gelernter ‘76, faculty political … Continue reading Yale Prof Estimates Faculty Political Diversity at ‘0%’ →

Maria L La Ganga: The lucky school is Cerritos College, one of California’s 115 educational workhorses, a two-year campus where nearly two-thirds of the student body lives at or below the poverty line, 82% receive financial aid and 70% attend part time, largely so they can hold down jobs. The program? Woodworking, vocational education at … Continue reading A band saw, a drill press and $2.3 million. College celebrates largest donation ever as ‘transformative’ →

New York Times: For nearly a century, many American college and university admissions officers have given preferential treatment to the children of alumni. The policies originated in the 1920s, coinciding with an influx of Jewish and Catholic applicants to the country’s top schools. They continue today, placing a thumb on the scale in favor of … Continue reading “End legacy Admissions” →

Madeline St. Amour: Only the relatively wealthiest students can afford to attend most public flagship institutions, according to a new report released last week by the Institute for Higher Education Policy. The report found that only six of 50 state flagships meet an affordability benchmark for low-income students (see graphic, below). Mamie Voight, vice president … Continue reading Public Flagship Universities Fail on Financial Equity →

Len Gutkin: Since stepping down from his 10-year tenure as dean of Yale Law School, Anthony T. Kronman has been thinking a lot about the larger purposes of a humanities education. He’s addressed the topic in two books, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Yale, 2007) … Continue reading Anthony Kronman on the ‘aristocratic ethos’ in higher education →

Daniel Payne: “[W]e have a system that preferences students who want to attend a four-year college over Americans who want to learn a skill,” Hawley stated, claiming that the current system “protects higher education institutions that have been padding their endowments with taxpayer money while they raise tuition.” Hawley’s two proposed bills would address these … Continue reading Senator pledges to ‘break up the higher education monopoly’ with new laws →

Wall Street Journal: How broken? The numbers tell the story. Borrowers currently owe more than $1.5 trillion in student loans, an average of $34,000 per person. Over two million of them have defaulted on their loans in just the past six years, and the number grows by 1,400 a day. After years of projecting big … Continue reading The Long Road To The Student Debt crisis →

Conor Friedersdorf: Educational institutions ought to teach young adults this justice-enhancing logic. Harvard is now teaching its undergraduates how to undermine it. Its shameful capitulation to popular passions began earlier this year when Ronald Sullivan, an African American law professor and faculty dean with a long history of freeing marginalized innocents from prison, announced that … Continue reading The Damage That Harvard Has Done →

The Economist: Fifteen years ago this spring, students at France’s elite postgraduate civil-service college were preparing to celebrate their graduation. Behind them lay the Alsatian city of Strasbourg, its beer halls, and two years of intense study at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ena). Ahead stood fast-track jobs in the parquet-floored corridors of power in Paris, … Continue reading Why Emmanuel Macron wants to abolish France’s most elite college →

Kim Krautkramer: I worked hard academically as a teenager, graduating first in my class at Marathon High School. I was accepted to UW-Madison but couldn’t swing the cost. Instead, I enrolled my freshman year at UW-Marathon County, a decision that turned out to be exactly right for me. The cost was lower, the professors were … Continue reading How ‘Badger Promise’ would have helped me as a first-generation Wisconsin student →

Boston Globe: The buyer, it turns out, was the father of a high school junior who was actively looking at applying to Harvard with an eye toward being on the fencing team. Soon enough, Jie Zhao’s younger son would gain admission and join the team. And Zhao, who never lived a day in the Needham … Continue reading He bought the fencing coach’s house. Then his son got into Harvard →

Kevin Carey: The colleges would have you believe that none of this is their fault. They would point out that public schools took a huge financial hit during the recession when states slashed their education budgets. This is true, but that hardly explains the size and pace of the price hikes or the fact that … Continue reading The Corporations Devouring American Colleges →

Herb Childress: Like any addict, I have to be vigilant whenever higher ed calls again. I know what it means to be a member of that cult, to believe in the face of all evidence, to persevere, to serve. I know what it means to take a 50-percent pay cut and move across the country … Continue reading How did we decide that professors don’t deserve job security or a decent salary? →

US Department of Justice: Duke University has agreed to pay the government $112.5 million to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by submitting applications and progress reports that contained falsified research on federal grants to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Justice Department announced … Continue reading Duke University Agrees to Pay U.S. $112.5 Million to Settle False Claims Act Allegations Related to Scientific Research Misconduct →

Matt Neuman: More than 100 other universities and university-associated foundations appear in the Paradise Papers leak, showing that offshore investing is far from an isolated incident at UM. While the offshore investing by the UM Foundation appears to be completely legal, the practices of offshore investing have been criticized by the public and scrutinized by … Continue reading The Paradise Papers leak exposes how university foundations across the country hide money in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda →

Alice Lloyd: “A lot of [the core curriculum] touches on questions essential to how people organize in society,” said one recent graduate, now working in the Trump administration. As a Hillsdale student reading Aristotle’s Politics, “It’s natural that you’d be thinking about how good government works”—and that you might wind up working in government yourself. … Continue reading Academia and Politics →

Alec MacGillis: The real driver of growth at Liberty, it turns out, is not the students who attend classes in Lynchburg but the far greater number of students who are paying for credentials and classes that are delivered remotely, as many as 95,000 in a given year. By 2015, Liberty had quietly become the second-largest … Continue reading How Liberty University Built a Billion-Dollar Empire Online →

Andrew Kreighbaum: But a group of private colleges still has its sights set on overturning a new endowment tax passed as part of that bill over the objections of higher ed advocates. The endowment tax was one of a number of punitive measures included in the legislation that either sought to generate new revenue from … Continue reading Private colleges look for repeal of endowment tax →

Janet Lorin: Now he’s found himself in a spat with the student newspaper over coverage of the endowment and subsequent publication of an email exchange between Swensen and editors. The dispute flared up over his op-ed column in the Yale Daily News, which he asked the staff to publish without editing. His March 1 piece … Continue reading Yale’s David Swensen Gets Into Spat With Student Paper Over Endowment →

Janet Lorin and Michelle Kaske: They’re asking university endowments to shed investments related to Puerto Rico’s debt, and Baupost is one of the largest holders of the U.S. territory’s bonds backed by sales-tax receipts. Activists say the debt burden is hindering an economy struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria in September. A few protests have … Continue reading Students at Harvard, Yale, Cornell and other wealthy colleges have a new target for their divestment protests: hedge fund Baupost Group. →

Ramsey Touchberry:: A new study by Wisconsin HOPE Lab founder Sara Goldrick-Rab and two co-authors found that thousands of community college students nationwide are homeless or on the verge of homelessness. The Wisconsin HOPE Lab says it’s “the nation’s first laboratory for translational research aimed at improving equitable outcomes in postsecondary education.” The study surveyed … Continue reading Up to 14% of community college students are homeless, new study says →

It’s interesting to consider recent Madison School Board/Administration decisions in light of David Brooks’ 7/11/2017 column: Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances … Continue reading On expanding Madison’s Least Diverse schools →

Andrew Ross Sorkin: If you were to look for one ingredient that binds together the nation’s chief executives, top managers and boards of directors, you’d find a remarkably consistent commonality, now and in generations past: A disproportionate number of them are graduates of Harvard Business School. An M.B.A. from H.B.S., as those in the know … Continue reading Book Pins Corporate Greed on a Lust Bred at Harvard →

Helen Andrews: Last fall, Toby Young did something ironic. Toby is the son of Michael Young, the British sociologist and Labour life peer whose 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy has been credited with coining the term. Toby has become an education reformer in his own right, as founder of the West London Free … Continue reading The New Ruling Class →