Spring Break
Endowment and tuition
Issue date: 2/7/08
The Senate Finance Committee's current investigations into endowment growth and whether university endowments can help ease the burden of tuition costs concerns every Hopkins student. The tuition at Hopkins is prohibitively expensive for many and efforts to alleviate such a burden must be taken.
It is important to carefully manage endowments and make investments that help it grow. The use of endowment capital for projects is important, but cutting tuition needs to be a priority.
This Senate investigation is important. It serves as a motivator for addressing critical questions. The Senate investigation has the primary effect of forcing universities to answer to the public and, in doing so, increase visibility, something this page has called for numerous times before.
According to the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Hopkins could cut its tuition in half by dedicating three percent of its endowment to the reduction. Though this might not be the proper percentage, Hopkins should consider using a relatively small percentage of its endowment to cut tuition. This could go a long way toward benefiting students.
Yet this is not the only way that the University can go about reducing tuition costs. One of the major obstacles in using endowment money for such cuts is that 90 percent of the Hopkins endowment is restricted. Hopkins is often marketed as a research institution more than a university, and thus much of the fundraising for the University is targeted toward such endeavors. Hopkins should target fundraising toward the expressed intent of lowering tuition.
If the University does not follow the track of making massive tuition cuts, a reasonable first step would be to put a moratorium on the annual rises in tuition that extend beyond rises in inflation. The University could use the money from increased fundraising and endowment allocation to enable this to happen without much radical change to the Hopkins budget.
Reducing tuition prices could greatly benefit middle-class undergraduates, especially those without the means to either qualify for adequate financial aid or pay the exorbitant cost of attending Hopkins.
It is important to carefully manage endowments and make investments that help it grow. The use of endowment capital for projects is important, but cutting tuition needs to be a priority.
This Senate investigation is important. It serves as a motivator for addressing critical questions. The Senate investigation has the primary effect of forcing universities to answer to the public and, in doing so, increase visibility, something this page has called for numerous times before.
According to the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Hopkins could cut its tuition in half by dedicating three percent of its endowment to the reduction. Though this might not be the proper percentage, Hopkins should consider using a relatively small percentage of its endowment to cut tuition. This could go a long way toward benefiting students.
Yet this is not the only way that the University can go about reducing tuition costs. One of the major obstacles in using endowment money for such cuts is that 90 percent of the Hopkins endowment is restricted. Hopkins is often marketed as a research institution more than a university, and thus much of the fundraising for the University is targeted toward such endeavors. Hopkins should target fundraising toward the expressed intent of lowering tuition.
If the University does not follow the track of making massive tuition cuts, a reasonable first step would be to put a moratorium on the annual rises in tuition that extend beyond rises in inflation. The University could use the money from increased fundraising and endowment allocation to enable this to happen without much radical change to the Hopkins budget.
Reducing tuition prices could greatly benefit middle-class undergraduates, especially those without the means to either qualify for adequate financial aid or pay the exorbitant cost of attending Hopkins.
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