7 ms·

I worked in Accounting (the dept that did it, not the one that taught it) IT at a major public university for several years. Something like half of the softwar

I worked in Accounting (the dept that did it, not the one that taught it) IT at a major public university for several years. Something like half of the software complexity was in keeping track of each dollar's origin, and making sure that it was spent on only what the source approved it to be spent on. Whether the source was the federal government, the state, corporate donors, or wealthy individuals, they all had strong opinions on what the money could be spent on. It was much easier to get money donated for a new building, than to maintain an old one, so you can have a situation in which new buildings are being built while old ones fall apart. The most surprising thing to me was how small a percentage of the budget was under the control of the president of the university; it was only a tiny amount. Virtually all of the money was controlled by the source, not by the administration.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jasode 6y ago
>complexity was in keeping track of each dollar's origin, and making sure that it was spent on only what the source approved it to be spent on. [...] they all had strong opinions on what the money could be spent on. Understand your frustration but the public was outraged when $1 million of a librarian's donation was used for a football scoreboard.[1] Yes, the university did comply to the exact letter of his will (only $100k was restricted for library and the rest was unrestricted) ... but the public thinks the spirit of his donation was ignored. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=librarian+donation+used+for+football+scoreboard https://www.google.com/search?q=librarian+donation+used+for+...
- xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
  The problem with that is, in part, that they ignored the spirit of the donation, but also that the proper amount for a university to spend on a scoreboard is twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents. OK, that's a bit unrealistic. I could build them one for a few hundred, though, and they could pay a student $50 to flip over the numbers during the game.
  - lrem 6y ago
    See, they evaded a recurring cost!
  - remote_phone 6y ago
    > I could build them one for a few hundred No, you couldn’t. It has to keep working for years/decades, be maintainable, survive bad weather conditions, etc. even if you made the scoreboard out of wood and painted it, it would have to be large enough so that the stadium could see, the paint would fade and it would take weeks to make it, etc.
    - dan-robertson 6y ago
      So rebuild it every time as necessary. It will take a long time to eat into $1MM
    - xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
      You're right, I couldn't. But I could buy one off the shelf for $25k! That's how much scoreboards cost if you want to show the score, not play full-color video. LED panels are cheap if you only need to show text. It's keeping up with the Joneses that's expensive.
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    The proper amount to spend is zero. There’s no reason for universities to be running minor league football teams with unpaid labor. On the contrary that’s the exact opposite of “charitable”.
    - wpietri 6y ago
      Definitely. One of my modest proposals that will never happen is that colleges go back to teaching, and football and basketball become more like baseball, where they have minor leagues as a way of getting players. The jumbling together of college and professional-in-all-but-name athletics is absurd, and egregious exploitation of "student" athletes to boot.
    - 6y ago
- saurik 6y ago
  I mean, when funds are unrestricted, they "should" become fungible; so, when I give unrestricted donations I also make it clear that I don't want them to try to tell me "we used your money to do X"... that way, I can look at anything I want on campus that was improved and think "I did that :)". If the university is spending money on bullshit, then probably they just don't deserve donations at all :/.
  - smt88 6y ago
    Every large org spends at least some money on bullshit, usually amounts that would shock the typical person. It's just one of the many inescapable inefficiencies that happen when humans try to create a large organization.
    - User23 6y ago
      True, but that doesn’t make it acceptable.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  Universities are literally the sole specific institutional exception in the essay: > There are a couple exceptions to this principle. One is when the nonprofit is an umbrella organization. It's reasonable to make a restricted donation to a university, for example, because a university is only nominally a single nonprofit. The article doesn't say what to do when donating to a university or college. So, when donating to a university, do also donate in a relatively unrestricted way. But donate to: 1. a department (in small amounts), 2. a scholarship fund (in medium amounts), 3. an endowed professorship for a specific department/discipline (in large amounts), or 4. some important component of the physical plant (in "Gates/Allen" amounts). Not to the university as a whole. At least that's what I've witness as being effective. Oh, and if you donate to scholarships, make sure the university/college plays ball. If they won't at least match 4% of the principle, just set up the scholarship an independent thing and let the kid choose where they go. Why donate a student scholarship to a specific school whose value is literally just the sustainable withdrawal rate? What's the point of that? Certainly not to help a student. Your donation will turn into a chair on the deck to be rearranged. But lots of donors get suckered into doing this.
michaelt 6y ago
> It was much easier to get money donated for a new building, than to maintain an old one, so you can have a situation in which new buildings are being built while old ones fall apart. That seems logical enough to me. I mean, if every new building is an unprofitable drag on university finances, they wouldn't be building more of them. At the very least a building should pay for its own upkeep, if not its original construction costs. And given that the fundraising department will surely want to tell rich donors that buildings are good for the university, simultaneously saying that the previous buildings were all bad for the university would be a very confusing message.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > if every new building is an unprofitable drag on university finances, they wouldn't be building more of them. No, you then need a steady supply of new buildings to provide funding to fix the old ones/replace the old ones.
- entangledqubit 6y ago
  I'd love to hear insider stories about how misaligned fundraising department metrics can end up being for the university. Regarding donating buildings in general, Andrew Carnegie seemed to get a lot of prestige leverage when he funded thousands of public libraries by paying for the buildings while requiring the locals to pay the upkeep and operation.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
> The most surprising thing to me was how small a percentage of the budget was under the control of the president of the university; it was only a tiny amount. Virtually all of the money was controlled by the source, not by the administration. I consider that good news, actually, because it makes restricted donations meaningful. I always assumed that restricted donations were pointless, because if I donated $x of restricted donations to cause A, the organization would simply take $x of unrestricted donations that it was planning to spend on cause A and instead spend them on other causes. All of my money technically went to cause A, but de facto it didn't. I still assume that's the case for regular, non-university charities.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  If you expect that someone just wants to steal your money (and I am not saying such expectation is always wrong), perhaps you just shouldn't give them any. On the other hand, if you trust that someone wants to do a good thing, they probably have more information about the topic than you do, so you should give them freedom to actually act on that information. Like, maybe you think "X is way more important than Y", but maybe the lack of Y is actually what prevents them from doing X efficiently, so your restriction to only use the money for X is not helpful, even from the X-maximizing perspective. Like, sometimes your mission is to distribute food to starving kids in Africa, but you can't organize your volunteers until you buy a new computer, because the only one you had just broke. Then someone gives you a paycheck with big letters "only use to buy food, I don't want to see you wasting money on computers". Yeah, thanks a lot, dear condescending saint.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    > If you expect that someone just wants to steal your money (and I am not saying such expectation is always wrong), perhaps you just shouldn't give them any. This is indeed the approach I've been taking with some climate change charities: most of them have an "advocacy" component, and while I'd like to support effective emissions reduction projects, I'm not willing to contribute to the preaching for individual asceticism. I have no issue giving to "some project + a proportionate share of central/overhead costs". Unfortunately, it's often extremely hard to find a charity that is tax deductible where you live, part of employer matching programs, effective in running projects you want to support, and not performing activities you specifically don't want to support.
agumonkey 6y ago
These kind of problems might be a good soil for some blockchain based things to reach actual utility. It pains me to see how difficult giving can be (even if it's justified) and having a solution to make it leaner would be very much welcomed.
andrewfong 6y ago
Reminds me of the story about the Yale donor who wanted a cathedral, but Yale wanted a gym, so they built a gym that looked like a cathedral. https://www.gpsmycity.com/attractions/payne-whitney-gymnasium-46130.html https://www.gpsmycity.com/attractions/payne-whitney-gymnasiu...
- HuShifang 6y ago
  Yup. They're really into the medieval aesthetic there -- the Hall of Graduate Studies was built in the 1930s IIRC, and they splashed the stone walls with acid and purposefully cracked some of the stained glass windows to make it all look that much more Oxbridge-y....
hanniabu 6y ago
> keeping track of each dollar's origin, and making sure that it was spent on only what the source approved it to be spent on Why not just keep a separate fund for each purpose and as these donations come in you route out the portions to the desired fund? If that is what's done then what's the difficult part that I'm missing?
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  Part of it was that each source wanted to be able to audit _their_ money, and have traceability. So in some sense it was just what you say, but that roughly doubles the amount of work done for accounting software. It also meant that most private-sector software was insufficient for the task.
ptest1 6y ago
Not only that, but many nonprofits must force their employees and even volunteers to use annoying time tracking software!
ISL 6y ago
The problem is even worse than that: The desire for fiscal accountability within universities is so high, there is little room for trust. My documentation and compliance burden was as high for a $5 purchase as a $5k purchase. My estimate of the salary cost (neglecting overhead) of approving a single purchase (my approval, electronic documentation, paper documentation, front-office approval, and PI oversight) was ~$80. That doesn't account for the impact of lost time on other tasks. For a $5 purchase. The true accountability -- If I consistently spent money on something contrary to the aims of the lab? I'd be either out of a job or deprived of tools necessary to get the work done.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jasode 6y ago

>complexity was in keeping track of each dollar's origin, and making sure that it was spent on only what the source approved it to be spent on. [...] they all had strong opinions on what the money could be spent on. Understand your frustration but the public was outraged when $1 million of a librarian's donation was used for a football scoreboard.[1] Yes, the university did comply to the exact letter of his will (only $100k was restricted for library and the rest was unrestricted) ... but the public thinks the spirit of his donation was ignored. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=librarian+donation+used+for+football+scoreboard https://www.google.com/search?q=librarian+donation+used+for+...

xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
The problem with that is, in part, that they ignored the spirit of the donation, but also that the proper amount for a university to spend on a scoreboard is twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents. OK, that's a bit unrealistic. I could build them one for a few hundred, though, and they could pay a student $50 to flip over the numbers during the game.
- lrem 6y ago
  See, they evaded a recurring cost!
- remote_phone 6y ago
  > I could build them one for a few hundred No, you couldn’t. It has to keep working for years/decades, be maintainable, survive bad weather conditions, etc. even if you made the scoreboard out of wood and painted it, it would have to be large enough so that the stadium could see, the paint would fade and it would take weeks to make it, etc.
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    So rebuild it every time as necessary. It will take a long time to eat into $1MM
  - xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
    You're right, I couldn't. But I could buy one off the shelf for $25k! That's how much scoreboards cost if you want to show the score, not play full-color video. LED panels are cheap if you only need to show text. It's keeping up with the Joneses that's expensive.
- bradleyjg 6y ago
  The proper amount to spend is zero. There’s no reason for universities to be running minor league football teams with unpaid labor. On the contrary that’s the exact opposite of “charitable”.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Definitely. One of my modest proposals that will never happen is that colleges go back to teaching, and football and basketball become more like baseball, where they have minor leagues as a way of getting players. The jumbling together of college and professional-in-all-but-name athletics is absurd, and egregious exploitation of "student" athletes to boot.
  - 6y ago
saurik 6y ago
I mean, when funds are unrestricted, they "should" become fungible; so, when I give unrestricted donations I also make it clear that I don't want them to try to tell me "we used your money to do X"... that way, I can look at anything I want on campus that was improved and think "I did that :)". If the university is spending money on bullshit, then probably they just don't deserve donations at all :/.
- smt88 6y ago
  Every large org spends at least some money on bullshit, usually amounts that would shock the typical person. It's just one of the many inescapable inefficiencies that happen when humans try to create a large organization.
  - User23 6y ago
    True, but that doesn’t make it acceptable.
throwawaygh 6y ago
Universities are literally the sole specific institutional exception in the essay: > There are a couple exceptions to this principle. One is when the nonprofit is an umbrella organization. It's reasonable to make a restricted donation to a university, for example, because a university is only nominally a single nonprofit. The article doesn't say what to do when donating to a university or college. So, when donating to a university, do also donate in a relatively unrestricted way. But donate to: 1. a department (in small amounts), 2. a scholarship fund (in medium amounts), 3. an endowed professorship for a specific department/discipline (in large amounts), or 4. some important component of the physical plant (in "Gates/Allen" amounts). Not to the university as a whole. At least that's what I've witness as being effective. Oh, and if you donate to scholarships, make sure the university/college plays ball. If they won't at least match 4% of the principle, just set up the scholarship an independent thing and let the kid choose where they go. Why donate a student scholarship to a specific school whose value is literally just the sustainable withdrawal rate? What's the point of that? Certainly not to help a student. Your donation will turn into a chair on the deck to be rearranged. But lots of donors get suckered into doing this.

michaelt 6y ago

> It was much easier to get money donated for a new building, than to maintain an old one, so you can have a situation in which new buildings are being built while old ones fall apart. That seems logical enough to me. I mean, if every new building is an unprofitable drag on university finances, they wouldn't be building more of them. At the very least a building should pay for its own upkeep, if not its original construction costs. And given that the fundraising department will surely want to tell rich donors that buildings are good for the university, simultaneously saying that the previous buildings were all bad for the university would be a very confusing message.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> if every new building is an unprofitable drag on university finances, they wouldn't be building more of them. No, you then need a steady supply of new buildings to provide funding to fix the old ones/replace the old ones.
entangledqubit 6y ago
I'd love to hear insider stories about how misaligned fundraising department metrics can end up being for the university. Regarding donating buildings in general, Andrew Carnegie seemed to get a lot of prestige leverage when he funded thousands of public libraries by paying for the buildings while requiring the locals to pay the upkeep and operation.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

> The most surprising thing to me was how small a percentage of the budget was under the control of the president of the university; it was only a tiny amount. Virtually all of the money was controlled by the source, not by the administration. I consider that good news, actually, because it makes restricted donations meaningful. I always assumed that restricted donations were pointless, because if I donated $x of restricted donations to cause A, the organization would simply take $x of unrestricted donations that it was planning to spend on cause A and instead spend them on other causes. All of my money technically went to cause A, but de facto it didn't. I still assume that's the case for regular, non-university charities.

Viliam1234 6y ago
If you expect that someone just wants to steal your money (and I am not saying such expectation is always wrong), perhaps you just shouldn't give them any. On the other hand, if you trust that someone wants to do a good thing, they probably have more information about the topic than you do, so you should give them freedom to actually act on that information. Like, maybe you think "X is way more important than Y", but maybe the lack of Y is actually what prevents them from doing X efficiently, so your restriction to only use the money for X is not helpful, even from the X-maximizing perspective. Like, sometimes your mission is to distribute food to starving kids in Africa, but you can't organize your volunteers until you buy a new computer, because the only one you had just broke. Then someone gives you a paycheck with big letters "only use to buy food, I don't want to see you wasting money on computers". Yeah, thanks a lot, dear condescending saint.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  > If you expect that someone just wants to steal your money (and I am not saying such expectation is always wrong), perhaps you just shouldn't give them any. This is indeed the approach I've been taking with some climate change charities: most of them have an "advocacy" component, and while I'd like to support effective emissions reduction projects, I'm not willing to contribute to the preaching for individual asceticism. I have no issue giving to "some project + a proportionate share of central/overhead costs". Unfortunately, it's often extremely hard to find a charity that is tax deductible where you live, part of employer matching programs, effective in running projects you want to support, and not performing activities you specifically don't want to support.

agumonkey 6y ago

These kind of problems might be a good soil for some blockchain based things to reach actual utility. It pains me to see how difficult giving can be (even if it's justified) and having a solution to make it leaner would be very much welcomed.

andrewfong 6y ago

Reminds me of the story about the Yale donor who wanted a cathedral, but Yale wanted a gym, so they built a gym that looked like a cathedral. https://www.gpsmycity.com/attractions/payne-whitney-gymnasium-46130.html https://www.gpsmycity.com/attractions/payne-whitney-gymnasiu...

HuShifang 6y ago
Yup. They're really into the medieval aesthetic there -- the Hall of Graduate Studies was built in the 1930s IIRC, and they splashed the stone walls with acid and purposefully cracked some of the stained glass windows to make it all look that much more Oxbridge-y....

hanniabu 6y ago

> keeping track of each dollar's origin, and making sure that it was spent on only what the source approved it to be spent on Why not just keep a separate fund for each purpose and as these donations come in you route out the portions to the desired fund? If that is what's done then what's the difficult part that I'm missing?

rossdavidh 6y ago
Part of it was that each source wanted to be able to audit _their_ money, and have traceability. So in some sense it was just what you say, but that roughly doubles the amount of work done for accounting software. It also meant that most private-sector software was insufficient for the task.

ptest1 6y ago

Not only that, but many nonprofits must force their employees and even volunteers to use annoying time tracking software!

ISL 6y ago

The problem is even worse than that: The desire for fiscal accountability within universities is so high, there is little room for trust. My documentation and compliance burden was as high for a $5 purchase as a $5k purchase. My estimate of the salary cost (neglecting overhead) of approving a single purchase (my approval, electronic documentation, paper documentation, front-office approval, and PI oversight) was ~$80. That doesn't account for the impact of lost time on other tasks. For a $5 purchase. The true accountability -- If I consistently spent money on something contrary to the aims of the lab? I'd be either out of a job or deprived of tools necessary to get the work done.