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Universities Are Becoming Billion-Dollar Hedge Funds with Schools Attached

• dalke 11y ago
  > "the latest wisecrack about Harvard" "Latest" in this case means "over 5 years old, but the author recently heard about it." Eg, the following 2010 comment at http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/05/secret-lives-of-professors.html http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/05/secret-lives-of-profe... uses the exact same phrase: "It is complicated, but one way to look at it is that Harvard is a very large hedge fund with a university attached to it (which gets a tiny fraction of the fund's payout each year)." And earlier 2007 piece titled "Goodbye, Princeton University" uses a similar construction, at http://www.nassauweekly.com/goodbye_princeton_university/ http://www.nassauweekly.com/goodbye_princeton_university/ : "Princeton University has ceased being primarily an institution of higher learning and is, like Goldman, a huge hedge-fund with a university that it runs as a side project." We also see it in several previous HN threads (see https://hn.algolia.com/?query=harvard%20hedge%20fund&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=harvard%20hedge%20fund&sort=by... ). The oldest is from 8 years ago, referencing a 2008 article titled "Is Harvard Just a Tax-Free Hedge Fund?" at http://theamericanscene.com/2008/05/12/is-harvard-just-a-tax-free-hedge-fund http://theamericanscene.com/2008/05/12/is-harvard-just-a-tax... > Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.