Re: news from Harvard
On Feb 9, 2007, at 9:50 AM, John Costello wrote:
On 2/9/07, Doug Henwood dhenwood@panix.com wrote:
[University endowments are weird things - they accumulate, accumulate, to god knows exactly what end. Love the math at the end of this.]
That’s enough money to pay the yearly tuition for 858,794 students=97more than 500 years of freshmen. (And, apparently, freshwomen!)
Which means that if they would 0.8% ROI, undergrads could go there =
for free.
Which, of course, they beat many times over - the Harvard (and Yale) =
endowments consistently beat the market by a wide margin. (Harvard =
famously shorted Enron, and made big bucks off it, while the =
University of California lost big bucks by merely being long a =
fashionable stock.) How they do this is a bit of a mystery, since =
it’s supposed to be impossible over the long term, as their business =
school faculties no doubt tells their finance students. Maybe they’re =
just very very smart. Or maybe having alums in influential positions =
has its benefits.
Doug