OUR OPINION: Use surplus to boost university endowments
June 23, 2012 at 4:30 pm in Grand Forks Herald
By devoting a share of the money to the endowments, North Dakotans can make the surplus work for them for generations. Continue Reading
OUR OPINION: Use surplus to boost university endowments
7 Comments
This is the sort of thinking that causes tuition to increase in the first place!
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I am puzzled as to how raising private donations and getting state financial support for endowments causes tuition to rise.
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It doesn’t. Kevin is just misinformed. It is a bad habit of his.
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Beefing up college endowments is a no brainer. It simply makes economic sense. The most successful investment program in US history was the post WWII GI bill. Scholars agree that the government “earned” $16 in increased tax revenue for every dollar spent. Wall Street only wishes it could get that return on the economy of scale the GI Bill represented.
That said, college endowments are only half of the story. If ND is to fully capitalize on its investment it needs jobs for its graduates. As has been pointed out many times on these boards, the MNPLS/St. Paul Chamber of Commerce should send the citizens of ND a thank you letter once a year for us providing them with the educated workforce they need to survive.
In order to reap the benefits of these endowments, the tax and spending revenue has to stay in the state. As it stands ND is getting older by the minute because once we finish educating our children, they leave for where they can get a job in their chosen field.
We need to find a way to keep these people here, and that means high paying jobs that require the education that we worked so hard to give them. Driving beet truck does not meet that requirement.
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It might be possible to start a new endowment controlled by the state, but the legislature is never going to stick huge amounts into the current endowments. The Foundations have been not very trustworthy. The money isn’t treated as public money, it becomes the private money of those running the foundations. They’ve done things with it like get a private jet for the NDSU President while saying they would have to cut core programs due to lack of funding. Then the President said NDSU didn’t have a jet because he thought it was in the Foundation’s name, but turned out it was in NDSU’s name.
The Foundations also had troubles when they decided to do things like build new homes for the Presidents and so on.
That all adds up to no way is the lagislature just going to hand over the money.
There is another way to build endowment. That would be to really treat your students well during their time on campus.
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Endowments are by nature political. That means they are open to abuse. That is why transparency is so important.
One way to restore faith in the system would be to make the SBHE elected. Right now it takes impeachment proceedings to remove them. I believe a little more direct influence is needed.
For a timely example of what can happen when an appointed group gets a little bit too big for its britches: the University of Virginia fiasco unfolding in the news makes for excellent background reading.
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New endowments, if not specifically designated, will probably not help the average student very much. For one thing, the foundations take 10% right off the top which, in this case, will be made up of taxpayer money. As well, like elected officials, university executives are all to eager to spend money on things that are not overly useful to the average citizen, in this case students. So, instead of lower tuition or lower student fees, we could end up with expenditures such as renovations of administrative offices, increased faculty grants, landscaping, new faculty offices, etc.
I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, but it needs to be done in such a way that the STUDENTS benefit, not the faculty or administration or foundations.
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