Tuesday, April 28, 2020

University finances

Colleges and universities are being badly hit by the Covid-19 virus. The spring and summer were pretty bad.  If, as likely, it extends into the fall things will be much worse. The tragedy of all this, for large private colleges, is that our administrations apparently learned nothing from 2009, and set themselves up for exactly the same (if not worse) financial crisis.

The exposure

It's hard to think of a business model more susceptible to pandemics. Students come to universities from all over the country, and all over the world. Many US colleges are highly dependent on full-tuition revenue from overseas, especially China. College education was a big export industry for the US, which travel and visa restrictions are likely to kill.

Many state schools depend on people paying full tuition from out of state. Lots of people are not likely to want to pay for online classes, and they certainly don't want to pay more quarters of room and board while living at home in another state. (This might be good for some flexible state schools or community colleges that can let people pick up some transferable credits).

Classes are really not the problem.  Undergraduates barely go to classes anyway, and, as reviewed in previous super-spreader posts, we have not seen classrooms as a site of such events. It seems like if people don't talk loudly, they don't spread the virus. The main problem is that the college experience in most of the US centers on a loosely supervised alcohol-fueled bacchanalia. As Stanford's president put it delicately in a recent email to faculty and staff,
A key challenge is the highly communal nature of our undergraduate living, dining and learning settings, which are not conducive to the physical distancing that has been a key means of controlling the pandemic...
How to spread Covid-19? Nursing home. Aircraft Carrier. Cruise Ship. Jail. College dorm or fraternity. 
A single “Beer Pong” party where participants shared drink glasses at an Austrian ski resort is credited with producing hundreds of infections in Denmark, Germany, and Norway (Hruby, 2020)
reports the excellent NBER working paper on Covid-19 models by Christopher Avery, William Bossert, Adam Clark, Glenn Ellison and Sara Fisher Ellison. Judging by the remains on my daily run past the frats at Stanford, normal life here consists of a lot of beer pong. 

(Digression. This is really a great paper. If you think "science" has anything on economics when it comes to forecasting models, you will see we are in the same boat. One of the best and most subtle points comes in discussing standard errors starting on the bottom of p. 25. The models all miss their 95% confidence intervals all the time. That tells you something about the confidence intervals. Delicious quote from Jonathan Dushoff:
“Retrospectively, the most successful looking model is also likely to be a model with narrow confidence intervals, where there was some luck involved in making the model forecasts look good. In cases where there's a lot of models, and not so many realizations, this is very likely to happen.
Welcome to finance everybody. End of digression.) 

There is also a population of students who have nowhere to go, who remain on campus, on financial aid.  Many universities depend on their hospitals for a steady flow of cash. The Covid wards are busy, but with many medicaid and uninsured patients, while everything else is empty. Hospitals are draining money right now. 

The money

The president's email gave us a suggestion of the situation at Stanford (also reported in the Stanford Daily)
For the current 2020 fiscal year, which ends in August, we are estimating a $200 million reversal in the consolidated budget of the university, leaving an anticipated $100 million deficit at fiscal year-end. The challenge is likely to grow in the 2021 fiscal year, when we expect to see reduced operating revenues in a number of areas as well as a potentially significant decline in endowment payout based on losses in the financial markets.
$200 million from March to August alone is real money. And students had paid tuition, room and board for spring. (I don't think they were refunded anything. Were they?)

Douglas Belkin and Melissa Korn write in WSJ that our nemesis to the north (on big game day) has the same loss
The University of California, Berkeley,..So far, the school has had a $200 million hit from lost revenue and additional expenses. The university’s annual operating budget is $3 billion.
and
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education..estimates the number of students on campus will decline by 15%, leading to $23 billion in lost revenue
At Brown,
 $22 million in lost revenue and additional costs. Dr. Paxson anticipates that will rise to between $80 million and $90 million next fall.
(The article also mentions the delicate question of Rhode Islands requirement that anyone coming in to the state quarantine for 14 days. Again, a business model dependent on students flying back and forth 4 times a year from out of state or out of the country is really susceptible to travel bans.)

State colleges and universities depend on state budgets. State budgets are cratering. Melissa Korn, writing in WSJ reports
Montclair State University, in New Jersey, said it has been told not to expect $12.3 million of state funding it had been counting on for the rest of the current fiscal year, after Gov. Phil Murphy slashed funding in light of the coronavirus’s toll on the local economy. That’s about 25% of the university’s annual state appropriation.  ..
If fall is virtual, the financial carnage will be huge.

Budget cuts

The budget cuts are coming.  At Stanford
the provost has asked units across the university to develop budget plans for a scenario that includes a 15 percent reduction in endowment payout and a 10 percent reduction in general funds for the 2021 fiscal year.
Budget cuts, hiring freezes, pay freezes and pay reductions are already under way at colleges across the country. The University of Arizona already announced furloughs and wage cuts up to 20%. So much for sticky wages. From the earlier WSJ, at Montclair state
.To make up for the unexpected loss of funds, the university instituted a hiring freeze, eliminated temporary and contingent positions including non-tenure-track instructors, deferred capital projects and is planning to offer fewer, larger classes come fall, she said
One might say that universities have an over-bloated staff and a lot of deadwood so this might not be a terrible thing. But that requires an administration ready to impose pain on entrenched constituencies. Not hiring promising new researchers is a lot easier.

The 2008-9 recession led to exactly the same responses.

Endowments

Well, if you're a business phenomenally exposed to a pandemic, and, as we learned in 2009, exposed to financial crises and recessions too, my wouldn't it be handy to have, say $30 billion in assets lying around (Stanford). Or $40 billion (Harvard). Every other business in the country is counting how many days they can last until the cash and borrowed money runs out. Wouldn't it be great to have enough assets for four years worth of expenses ($6.8 billion budget). You could keep your faculty and staff, you could go out and hire all the best young people in next years' carnage of a job market, you could go poach the best senior faculty.

Wait a minute, we have cuts and freezes too -- just like 2009 (and just as Harvard, Chicago, and all the other big private universities did in 2009). What the heck is going on? How can you have $30 billion in the bank and budget cuts and salary freezes?

Well, that's not now it works. The endowments of major private universities have next to no cash. Actually they have next to no liquid assets. Here's as much as I could find on the Stanford management company website


Right away you can tell that the private equity and real estate is completely illiquid. My understanding from other sources is that the rest of it is all actively managed and highly illiquid. The Stanford management company (for a fee) sends its investments to managers who, for a fee, buy the actual investments, which are mostly illiquid. A colleague guesstimates the fees at $700 million dollars.

So, bottom line, private universities can't sell the assets if they wanted to. (We also don't want to. Universities hold to payout rules and do not use endowments as a rainy day fund. They don't even borrow against endowments. Long story, but one that could have been changed between 2008 and now.)

Moreover, we're leveraged. Large private universities are allowed to borrow money tax-free. I couldn't find the total, but I did find one issue for Stanford at $500 million.  When I looked, Chicago had several billion in debt.

Everyone wants to be a hedge fund. Borrow short and cheap, invest in illiquid, high-fee, actively managed, cyclically sensitive securities. Report great returns. And, in the downturn, carnage ensues.

I would be kinder about this if we had not gone through this a mere 12 years ago. In 2009, all the major universities faced financial carnage. Despite pleasant disclaimers about being "long run investors" who could "wait out market downturns" (Chicago's website in 2008), in the crisis it turned out universities had to roll over debts at high interest rates, and tried to sell in a crisis. Harvard tried to sell its portfolio of private equity in .. December 2008! It was only saved by a complete absence of buyers. It had a hiring freeze while the endowment was supposedly $45 billion dollars. Chicago did manage to sell most of its equity just about exactly at the bottom.

Well, once burned twice shy they say? No. Like everyone else in America, universities went right back to the hedge fund with a football team model. And here we are again. Budgets evaporating. And firing people, cutting wages, and missing opportunities.


Update:

University endowment practices are quite a puzzle. Why do universities invest in assets rather than people? When huge corporations sit on cash, we assume they have no good investment projects. Why do they follow a fixed payout policy rather than, as above, use them as a buffer stock? Why are they invested in obscure, illiquid, hard to value, assets, with at least two layers of high fees (university management + asset managers) rather than, say, have one part-time employee and put the whole business into Vanguard total market for about 10 basis points? Why do they leverage with short-term municipal debt which must be rolled over at the most inconvenient times? Why do university preseidents seem to glory in great endowment returns in good times, but these occasional liquidity crunches are seen simply as acts of nature, not preventable with a nice pile of liquid assets?  Why do donors put up with this -- why do donors give money that will be managed in obscure high fee investments, rather than demand low-fee transparent investment, or even set up separate trusts, transparently managed, to benefit their alma maters?

Thomas Gilbert and  Christopher Hrdlicka have a nice paper on some of these issues, "Why Are University Endowments Large and Risky?" in the Review of Financial Studies. As they document, the practice of paying out a fraction of value, but in the old parlance never touching the "principal," is due to regulation in the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA), and like all regulations has unintended consequences. They
seek to explain why universities (and nonprofits more generally) that have productive internal projects sufficient to motivate their high donation rates tolerate the opportunity cost of building large and risky endowments.
They construct a nice economic model to try to understand this behavior and see what levers might result in a more efficient outcome. In their model, the payout constraint
 prevents the endowment's use as an effective buffer stock, thereby increasing the volatility of production, and it slows the growth of the most productive universities.
It's surely worth more economic investigation.

The other salient feature of universities is that they are non-profits. This doesn't mean they don't make profits. This means they don't have shareholders and so are insulated from the market for corporate control. If you think a company is badly managed, you can buy up the shares, take over the company, and set things right. You can't do that with a university, hospital, or other "non-profit," which naturally leads to high staff and expense levels.

More updates:

This post seems to inspire my email correspondents. It's probably easier to keep updating here than to add posts.

Where are the trustees? Well, I speculated to one correspondent, there is a natural selection bias. How do you get to be a university trustee? 1) Make a ton of money as a (lucky) active asset manager, especially on trades and investments that come from college contacts;  2) Collect a lot of fees;  3) Persuade yourself how smart you are and how easy the alpha game is 4) Desire to socialize with the people who run universities. This is hardly likely to produce contrarians, fans of scientifically validated, quantiative, low-fee investment strategies.

My correspondent did the leg work for Stanford, and adds up our trustees thus:
32 Stanford Trustees
18 investment banking and hedge funds.  (2 indirect as wives)
9 tech.  1 of them a wife
2 manufacturing. (1 GM, 1 housing)
1 retail.
2 law (1 wife)
Wives typically run foundations related to education.
"Wife" rather than the usually appropriate gender-neutral "spouse" is technically correct.

***

A second correspondent found Stanford's actual debt. Roughly speaking it's $2.5 billion total outstanding. Why borrow and invest at the same time? Because we borrow at tax free rates and don't pay taxes on investment returns. By hedge fund standards it's not a lot of debt though. When I left Chicago was a lot more leveraged. (Chicago was making huge investments in plant and faculty however, exactly the lack of which I was criticizing above. Though it was contentious, I agreed with President Zimmer's view that Chicago had one chance to invest in human and physical capital to stay on top.) I note with pleasure that Stanford's debt is almost all long term. Unless there are swap contracts I don't know about (that's what got Harvard into trouble in 2009), this is praiseworthy. I wish the US were funding itself so long term. It means if (when) interest rates rise, Stanford won't be hit by big interest costs, or rollover crises.

My correspondent also found Stanford's 2019 financial report.


Tuition is not a big deal -- unlike the case at most universities. In part, Stanford like other large private universities runs one of the biggest price discrimination games in the country,
48% of undergraduates were awarded need-based financial aid from Stanford while 81% of graduate students received some form of financial support.
Imagine how happy United Airlines would be if they could ask for your 1040 and a statement off assets before quoting you the price of a ticket to New York.

Most of the money comes from "sponsored support,"
Sponsored support is the largest source of operating revenue, representing 27% of total revenues. The majority of the University’s sponsored support is received directly or indirectly from the federal government. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are the two largest federal sponsors.
and 20% comes from running a hospital. (One look at the bills they send tells you a lot about that, and its durability. Most recently, 10 minute telemedicine video chat about a hand injury cost $680 after "insurance discount." When Stanford gets the medicare for all that most of its faculty vote for, watch out.)

This provides an interesting look at the real risks to the budget. That so much Stanford research ends up cheering the federal government is at best a noteworthy coincidence.

***

Melissa Korn, Douglas Belkin and Juliet Chung have a long update on colleges and universities in WSJ. As you would imagine, small tuition dependent liberal arts colleges are most heavily hit. They were already in trouble.  Recessions do wipe out marginal businesses.
Even before the virus hit, many colleges and universities were running on razor-thin margins, with 30% of those rated by Moody’s Investors Service showing operating deficits.
Published tuition rates had skyrocketed, but few students actually paid full price. That left schools fighting over a limited pool of wealthy prospects. Some schools had turned to international students to bolster revenue—a strategy that may now prove to be a liability....
Before the pandemic, about 100 of the nation’s 1,000 private, liberal-arts colleges were likely to close over the next five years, 
But trouble is brewing at the top too.
Princeton University, one of the wealthiest in the country, with an endowment valued at $26 billion last year, announced a salary and hiring freeze. It is cutting back on all nonessential spending and won’t renew employment deals with some contract workers...
Johns Hopkins University went from projecting a $72 million surplus this fiscal year to expecting a net loss of more than $100 million. ...
One major factor: revenues have plummeted as the Johns Hopkins Health System abandoned most elective procedures in response to the pandemic, illustrating a particular vulnerability for universities with major medical centers. 
Mr. Daniels [President] has detailed plans to cut salaries and suspend retirement contributions and capital projects. 
***

The Stanford Daily reports 
When asked if it was possible to address the deficit by decreasing the endowment principal — the core invested portion — Drell responded that “options are open,” but only 20 to 25% of the endowment can be used, without legal restriction, for the University as need may be.
“There is a real caution that needs to be applied in using long-term funds for short-term needs,” she said.
One can also borrow using securities as collateral.

***

Disclaimer: This is not about Stanford, nor is it a complaint about any individual. The general character of the endowment was similar when I was at Chicago, and my understanding of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, etc. is that it's broadly the same everywhere, as it is at major nonprofits. As Gilbert and  Hrdlicka point out, economists should regard any behavior this uniform as an inevitable and rational response to some screwed up incentive.




   





24 comments:

  1. How much of this do you view as "endowments don't want to sell at bad prices, so they cut payouts" versus "we collectively decided to trim budgets in the face of the pandemic?" It's hard to distinguish cause from effect here as an outsider.

    Typo: the budget of Stanford is 6.8 billion with a B.

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  2. I have exactly zero sympathy for Stanford, Chicago (My alma mater), Harvard ...

    They have lived off the fat of the land and the generosity of the American taxpayer for many long years. Let them go bankrupt and be liquidated.

    If we are going to spend tax money on higher education it should be on institutions that help average Americans -- community colleges and state non research universities.


    $700 million in management fees? Somebody is running a number on us. let them bail themselves out.

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    1. Fat Man: agree 100% on funding community colleges and non-research institutions. Expand access and supply. Make it affordable but not entirely free; helps address moral hazard problems for students.

      And yes those management fees are just graft. Ridiculous.

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  3. Don't the public know endowments are for building olympic-size swimming pools? How can they be so cruel.

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  4. As the ball rolls down an uncharted path, it makes me wonder if an endogneous event in the markets would have produced the same condition you speak of now. My guess is no, because the virus has forced businesses and institutions that rely on lots of close social interactions to have to rethink how to deliver a product/service.

    This education model has been going on a long time, and it has its benefits of being structured as such. Meet other people, interactions with experts in academia, libraries, access to research, it goes on and on. So, institutions can pivot, or they can rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic.

    I think it speaks to the trend of ignoring reality and trying to shape it for short term gains. Dangerous and risky in the face of events that severely shock the economy. Being cautious to prevent the spread will translate into a loss in overall capacity, however. So we have to choose: stability or indulgence. Unfortunately, we've seen where appetites and preferences lie...

    Best,
    M

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  5. Ok great post but one axe to grind.

    First, love the statement about undegrads and classes! So true, and if only their parents knew! Its also nice to see that even the next generation of rarefied intellegentsia share the same zeal for beer pong as do the kids from State U.

    Ok onto the axe. According to the post, Stanford has 27% in "Domestic and International Equity". Apropos your many, many previous writings that is basically "cash in waiting" as equities are super-duper liquid. Consider the volume of stock trading in the past month in the US which is double the usual level! Plenty of trades happening at tiny spreads. Fine - don't liquidate it all at once but that exposure can be monetized over several quarters at pretty low cost. Even the dividends could be harvested and that won't require any selling.

    Finally, you are correct that one could write a very nice blog indeed on why so many university endowments are in bed with so many high-fee, illiquid, and non-transparent investments which are routinely shown to offer poorer risk-return than plain 'ol US equities. Are universities really supposed to be illiquid hedge funds? Really? In the current circumstance it seems like its time for the universities to eat some veggies. Sell some PE, take your 30% haircut and move on.

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    Replies
    1. One tool that should be deployed to bring the endowments to heal is the Federal Unrelated Business Income Tax. In theory any income accruing to a tax-exempt entity that is not related to its charitable mission should be taxed as if it were received by a taxable corporation.

      The university endowments that invest in hedge funds, vineyards, shopping malls, and sundry illiquid investments should not receive the income from those investments tax free. But, I would go even farther. I would make it a rule that any income received by any sizable college endowment other than interest on Federal and Municipal Bonds or on Student Loans is Unrelated Taxable Income subject to the UBIT.

      Delete
    2. heel not heal Pandemic on my mind.

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  6. Your statements about college students and their lifestyles on campus really screams to me as condemnation of the school system and validation of Brian caplan's signaling model.

    As a side note, I find it fascinating that out-of-state tuition is being as expensive as they are isn't brought up as a source of inequality in our country and a big deterrent for labor mobility. If you happen to be a student who lives in the rust belt, being priced out of a school in California would seem to be a terrible thing, yet I never hear this issue being brought up.

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  7. A cogent post as always. Your points on hospitals and endowment fees are spot on. For more context about Stanford's situation, an excerpt from my draft of an unpublished student newspaper column (about 1.5 years old so some stats may be dated):

    [Stanford's] liabilities are growing faster than its assets. Trouble began in 2009, when the University’s endowment[1] declined 27 percent, but its operating expenses were cut by only 1 percent. Debt ballooned to cover the difference. Though assets grew moderately faster than debt in 2011, 2014, and 2015, debt has grown every fiscal year of the past decade.

    Stanford’s reliance on debt to fund itself could further swell in the face of shifts in healthcare. Revenue[2] from Stanford Health Care and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital is growing at 12 percent annually and now comprises more than half of consolidated revenue for the University. The old joke is that Stanford is a hedge fund with a university attached. A timely comedian could quip Stanford is now a hospital with a hedge fund attached…

    Stanford’s endowed real estate assets[3], totaling more than $5 billion in market value and providing $131 million in income annually, have also buoyed the school’s finances. Those assets have benefited from positive dynamics in the Bay Area and could be curtailed by a reversal in hotel and commercial occupancy rates or retail sales in the area. Growing costs of borrowing would likely happen during a broader downturn, and so not only would real estate assets lose value but also donors would be less able to step up with gifts. Charitable donations[4] to the University dropped 41 percent in 2009. The endowment’s ability to bridge the University through a period of rising borrowing costs is also limited by its liquidity, as various investments are locked up in long-term commitments.

    At the end of the last fiscal year, Stanford’s total debt[5] stood at over $11 billion and its total assets[6] at about $52 billion. In the current academic year, the school will spend[7] $199 million just to service its debt, about 3 percent of its annual budget. In a time of historically low interest rates, this debt service nearly equals the schools projected spending on financial aid, about 5 percent of its annual budget. Should interest rates rise to 5 percent and the school’s debts grow this year as quickly as last year, Stanford’s annual interest cost would total $640 million. Such high nondiscretionary payments would either beget more debt or crowd out expenditures like financial aid, faculty salaries, and graduate stipends...

    Stanford is not alone. Harvard University spends[8] $203 million per year servicing its debt. Duke University has received[9] $1.3 billion from its hospital in support of university functions over the past decade. The University of Chicago had a debt-to-assets ratio[10] of 0.45 at the end of the fiscal year. Indebtedness is an even worse reality at public schools. The University of California has[11] a debt-to-assets ratio of 0.96 (approaching Lehman levels), receives half of its revenue from its hospitals, and holds $60 billion in total debt.

    [1] http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/AR_FinancialReview_2009_Final.pdf
    [2] http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/SU_AnnualFinancialReport_2017.pdf
    [3] http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/SU_AnnualFinancialReport_2017.pdf
    [4] http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/AR_FinancialReview_2009_Final.pdf
    [5] http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/SU_AnnualFinancialReport_2017.pdf
    [6] http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/SU_AnnualFinancialReport_2017.pdf
    [7] http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/BudgetBookFY18.pdf
    [8] https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/final_harvard_university_financial_report_2017.pdf
    [9] https://finance.duke.edu/resources/docs/financial_reports.pdf
    [10] https://annualreport.uchicago.edu/page/financial-results-fiscal-year-2017
    [11] https://finreports.universityofcalifornia.edu/index.php?file=16-17/pdf/fullreport-1617.pdf

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  8. Anything which can make a dent in debt financed consumption called college is welcome.

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  9. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-million

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  10. of possible interest - the 2019 NACUBO-TIAA Study of Endowments. Most colleges and universities participate in the study and have access to it.

    https://www.nacubo.org/Research/2020/NACUBO-TIAA-Study-of-Endowments

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  11. What you don't mention is that much of endowments is tied to funding specific things that donors wanted to fund and for that reason can't be used as a buffer or slush fund.

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  12. > It's hard to think of a business model more susceptible to pandemics.

    The exact opposite of Cochrane's statement is true. Cochrane is grossly wrong on this.

    In the linked letter from the President of Stanford University, they are facing a $200 million shortfall due to increased financial aid payouts, and lower than expected endowment payouts. Sure, $200 million is a lot of money, but when compared to Stanford's normal annual revenue of over $6 billion, that's merely a 3.3%. There's no mentions of pay cuts. I presume most faculty and administrative staff are collecting their full salaries and have taken 0% pay reductions.

    Consider day care centers, entertainment venues, fitness clubs, restaurants, beauty parlors... Many of those were legally forced to shut down and forfeit 100% of their revenues. Many owners and workers are not getting any salary.

    I'd rather be at the university facing a 3.3% revenue drop and keeping 100% of my salary then at a local business facing a 100% revenue drop and keeping 0% of my salary.

    Next, Cochrane characterizes universities as foreign export industry dependent on Chinese students paying full tuition. This is grossly inaccurate as well.

    Stanford's typical annual revenue is $6+ billion:
    - $1 billion from student tuition + room & board
    - $2.5 billion from sponsored research
    - $1.3 billion from Stanford Health Care
    - $1.3 billion from the endowment
    (source: https://www.stanforddaily.com/2019/01/07/stanfords-finances-explained/)

    I presume most of that $2.5 billion of sponsored research is US government contract dollars. Even their tuition and room & board, accounting for ~1/6 of revenue is padded with federal assistance dollars. And of course, the endowment is given government tax breaks which are arguably the same as government subsidies. Universities are more like government contractor businesses than foreign export industries.

    Schools like Stanford boast of their exclusivity and their 4.7% admission rate or equivalently their 95.3% rejection rate. If they were so dependent on tuition dollars, they wouldn't turn away tuition dollars so frequently.

    Grad students are often paid stipends or salaries. To be clear, the students don't pay the school. The school pays the student. This includes foreign students from China. This is the opposite of Cochrane's suggestion.

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  13. Summary. Illiquid assets, high debt and excessive risk exposure. Wow! What could possibly go wrong? When asked to comment on Murphy's Law, Goldberg said Murphy is an optimist.

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  14. I thought endowments consisted mostly of restricted funds, e.g., to construct a new theater, to fund scholarships in East Asian Feminist Studies, or to install green energy infrastructure, etc. In other words, the university can't spend that money on general operating expenses.

    Is that not true at the top colleges?

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  15. Hi, John! I did do "some more economic investigation" on UPMIFA. In Education Finance and Policy last year:
    https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/edfp_a_00239

    Here's what I had to say about Gilbert and Hrdlicka:
    "Gilbert and Hrdlicka (2015) discuss the clause in many states’ enacted versions of UPMIFA that sets a sharp limit by establishing a rebuttable presumption of imprudence if a college spends more than 7 percent of some measure of current endowment value. Under current practice however, this 7-percent ceiling will rarely be hit as colleges spend closer to 5 percent of current value."

    My paper investigates the sharp constraint in UPMIFA's predecessor law, that was in effect in many states during the late 2000s recession. Much more detail in the paper, but I find that when UPMIFA freed up colleges to spend more after a crisis, they still spent a pretty normal amount similar to what their formulas would dictate. They didn't deviate to spend more or to spend less than one might predict. The old law was binding, and did explain some of the belt-tightening on college campuses. But overall colleges didn't deem it "prudent" to use the endowment as a rainy day fund, even the ones that had significant unrestricted funds in their endowments.

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  16. See Richard Ennis' paper "Institutional Investment Strategy and Manager Choice: A Critique"

    Using a Sharpe (Stanford Connection) style analysis the paper finds:

    "The cost of institutional investing is 1.0% to 1.7% of asset value annually. Public pension funds underperformed passive investment by approximately 1.0% a year for the 10 years ended June 30, 2018; the shortfall of educational endowments was 1.6% a year."

    Moreover a higher allocation to alternatives is significantly related to a lower alpha. Along with that lower alpha comes a ton of illiquidity and lack of price discovery.

    https://jpm.pm-research.com/content/early/2020/02/28/jpm.2020.1.141.abstract

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  17. Student at Purdue: Purdue has significant investments in real estate, but it uses most of that real estate to accommodate students. If you go to Purdue's campus, there are always construction crews everywhere, and as soon as they finish a project they start two more. They are still operating, despite the virus.

    Which begs the question, if we are not going back to Purdue's campus for a prolonged period of time, well, that investment will go to zero. No point in building a new lab, which they have been doing for the past three years, if students are not allowed to be in it. There are at least 3 new residence halls coming up to accommodate new students because Purdue's business model has been to increase the student population to keep tuition down. If those students don't come, there would be a significant problem.

    Mitch Daniels, Purdue's president, is one of the most financially prudent university presidents in the country. He has detailed a plan for reopening. Tuition is priced at supply and demand, not based on whether the university is struggling. I would refuse to pay full tuition for online education, regardless of whether the university is also hurting. I wonder what his plan to deal with the funding shortfall is.

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  18. "Classes are really not the problem. Undergraduates barely go to classes anyway... The main problem is that the college experience in most of the US centers on a loosely supervised alcohol-fueled bacchanalia."

    How did we get to this point, where we tell young people that spending 4 years in a "loosely supervised alcohol-fueled bacchanalia" is the way to invest in their future?

    Also, have things really changed that fast? I was in college less than a decade ago and I definitely saw a lot of undergraduates in class. Then again, I was at Cal, not Stanford! :P

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  19. Which University Is Very Costly For A Middle Class Student?

    ReplyDelete

Comments are welcome. Keep it short, polite, and on topic.

Thanks to a few abusers I am now moderating comments. I welcome thoughtful disagreement. I will block comments with insulting or abusive language. I'm also blocking totally inane comments. Try to make some sense. I am much more likely to allow critical comments if you have the honesty and courage to use your real name.