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Yale Drama goes tuition-free with $150m gift from David Geffen
- underseacables 5y agoMust be nice to attend a school with $32 billion dollars in the bank.
- xkeysc0re 5y agoI had a friend who attended Yale Photo MFA, one of the most prestigious art programs in the world. They still had to pay all the costs of printing and their windowless studios were in a dank basement of an old gymnasium.
- mistrial9 5y agosuffering enables certain bonding -- art students are often massively, embarrassingly entitled source: I was an art student
- ciabattabread 5y agoI went to a Yale arts open house one time, and all the studios I visited had daylight and were about the size of a 2-person dorm room. Different departments with different budgets?
- aqme28 5y agoThere's a joke out there that big universities are just hedge funds that do a little work giving out degrees as a marketing expense.
- tombert 5y agoI could be misremembering this, but wasn't there some drama about five years ago about schools literally investing a lot of their endowment and the like in hedge funds?
- finolex1 5y agoI think it is pretty common for schools to let hedge funds manage a large portion of their endowment. Not sure what the reason for drama is.
- tombert 5y agoI think it leaves a bad taste in people's mouth since hedge funds are typically a bit riskier than a savings account.
- finolex1 5y agoHedge funds have targets for volatility and rates of return that they try to meet. Endowment managers take such metrics into account when allocating money across different asset classes. They are most certainly not giving away their entire endowment to buy GME. The only controversy I can see is whether the returns provided by hedge funds outweigh the management/performance fees they charge.
- tombert 5y agoThat's fair, as I said I barely remember the details of this, and I know very very little about how these kinds of investments work.
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- carnitine 5y agoA savings account is not open to an endowment and will be eroded by inflation. Any university endowment will need to be invested in something riskier.
- seoaeu 5y agoI've always thought of it as running an education side-business for tax purposes
- whymauri 5y agoThey have investment management companies now. MIT has MITIMCO; Yale has the Yale Investment Committee.
- akudha 5y agoThis feels just weird to me. I can understand having some money in the bank as a cushion etc, but tens of billions of dollars? Aren't these institutions supposed to further education and spend whatever resources they have for that purpose instead of hoarding and running a hedge fund style investment program?
- ceilingcorner 5y agoUniversities stopped being about education when 1) they became a replacement for on the job training and 2) activists began the “long march through the institutions.” Today they are more akin to NGOs than schools.
- jessaustin 5y agoIMHO large endowments are less of a distraction to the purpose of the university than NCAA sports are. The Ivy League simply shut down sports completely during COVID time, which was certainly a better idea than the dozens of colleges who got as many students on campus as they could and then had to send them home within months or (!) weeks. If voters want third-class universities without endowments to continue to exist, they need to elect politicians willing to support those universities with public funds.
- pm215 5y agoI think if you asked these universities they would say that they are taking the very long term view. (For instance the one I went to has been around for 800 years already.) If you are thinking on a timescale of centuries then you want to treat your funds as capital, so you spend your investment income on research, scholarships, building maintenance and other educational goals, but you don't eat into the capital or in 200 years you'll be in a bad place financially. And if your funds are sizeable then investing them and managing them is a big job that you probably don't want to outsource.
- robmiller 5y agoSlightly off topic, but I attended a higher-ed conference a couple years ago and the administrators are all scared about 2025. The birthrate took a hit in 2008 and has never recovered. Peak enrollment will be 2024 and then diminish for the foreseeable future. The expectation is that top tier schools will be fine, just less selective, but the B- and C-tier schools are going to suffer. I suppose they can make it up in international enrollment--that wasn't discussed.
- LanceH 5y agoMaybe they could start paying property taxes.
- queuebert 5y agoNot in the bank. In a basket of investments that doesn't entirely align with Yale's mission statement.
- prepend 5y agoIt’s funny, if they earn 2% per year that’s $640M. With 12k undergrads at $60k, that’s $720M. Seems like they should just stop charging tuition altogether.
- bilbo0s 5y agoThat's not how endowments work. I'm 99.9999% positive that what you suggest would be illegal, and would land the administrators in prison. As a lawyer once explained it to me, if person X gives organization Y some amount of money Z for purpose W, then spending even a penny of Z on purpose Q is felony fraud. I could be wrong, but that's how it was explained to me.
- kristjansson 5y agoRestricted gifts exist, but it's wrong to state categorically that the existence of restricted gifts precludes spending any endowment income on tuition. GP is also simplistic - not all the endowment income is available to cover operating expenses - but is directionally right. Lots of scholarships and the like offered by schools are transfers from the endowment to the operating budget mediated through a 'lower' tuition bill for the student. A relevant number to look at is the average income per student (money + loan proceeds) to the school - usually that's much, much less than the stated cost of attending.
- prepend 5y agoI’m sure there are exceptions based on the gifts, but I doubt all $35B have such restrictions. Also it seems odd that a large number of donors would have restrictions that prevent covering tuition and expenses of teaching.
- boringg 5y agoWhere do you think the tech industry would be without the endowment funds of universities? They almost single handedly gave rise to VCs in the 80s/90s -=-> fast forward to today.
- nickthemagicman 5y agoI love how rich people, with the wave of their hand, can just make everyone's tuition free at their pet schools of choice.
- minikites 5y agoThis is the only option left, in the last 40 years we've decided as a society that funding higher education through taxes is bad.
- dfxm12 5y agoThis assumes that the government actually reflects the will of the people. A majority of people seems to want at least some type of reform on this matter [0], but our elected officials aren't following though with it. Some have made promises that they haven't kept, but most politicians seem to not care about the will of the people. 0 - https://theharrispoll.com/student-debt-reform/ https://theharrispoll.com/student-debt-reform/
- rayiner 5y ago“Do you support X” questions don’t mean anything without the “what will you pay?” question. European countries tax middle class people to subsidize the 25-30% of relatively privileged people who get a university degree. That’s actually quite regressive. The Anglo (US, UK, and AUS) system of government loans with income-based repayment is superior.
- minikites 5y agoWhy are those the only two options? Is taxing wealthy people impossible?
- rhino369 5y agoYou could. But you can only tax them so much. And the truly rich are able to avoid taxes by moving capital around. There are a lot of progressive spending proposals and they all can't be paid by just taxing the wealthy. Using that money to pay for benefits that mostly go to privileged people is not the best use of dollars. College graduates make more money on average, by a lot, 30 thousand dollars. Our current system address those who have loans but don't actually get high income. They barely have to pay their loans--and often don't pay anything. A person making 35k, with an average of 3.5% a year income growth won't pay a single cent under the PAYE program if they have a family of four.
- Invictus0 5y ago$150M * 5% per year = $7.5M 200 students * $32,800 per year = $6.56M If it costs $150 million to cover the tuition for 200 students, surely the interest from Yale's massive endowment could cover tuition for a much greater number of students?
- rvn1045 5y agoIvy League schools already have pretty generous financial aid policies. Most students are not paying full tuition.
- Alex3917 5y agoYale's endowment (presumably) already covers the tuition of every student, just not the full tuition. At most private universities, student tuition only covers something like a third the cost of attending.
- colinmhayes 5y agoYale has 12000 students, 7000 are grad students, many of which have tuition waiver. Even if every one of these 12000 paid $40,000 tuition receipts would only be half a billion which is a third of what their endowment makes a year. I'd be very surprised if the actual tuition receipts are even a third of that with all the scholarships and phd waivers they give out. Still, why throw away 100+ million a year if you don't have to?
- dopamean 5y ago"throw away"
- tiahura 5y agoThe real takeaway is how underfunded higher Ed is. I’m no Marxist but my intuition is that the the total payoff of a system where every high school graduate who maintains halfway decent grades can attend State U Springfield, tuition and room and board covered, would exceed the costs?
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- vwoolf 5y agoThe rich get richer, it seems. It's to be hoped that what's happening in the drama school is less dramatic than what's happening in the law school: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/what-is-going-on-at-yale-law-school https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/what-is-g...
- Cd00d 5y agoI appreciated the link, as I read the article and found it very interesting. But, I have no idea what connection you're drawing or point you're trying to make....
- hellbannedguy 5y agoDrama classes should be free. The odds of anyone breaking into that hollywood club is like winning the lottery. I have respect for anyone who sticks with acting though.
- clintonb 5y agoHollywood may be the pinnacle for some actors financially, but the stage is where many want to hone/demonstrate their abilities. I disagree that drama classes should be free solely on the basis that actors, on average, are not highly-paid. That opens the door to income-based repayment for every other major/career combination.
- pmoriarty 5y agoInstead of advocating for drama school to not be free because every other school isn't free, we should be advocating for every school to be free.
- Grakel 5y agoTheatre designer here. Just being accepted into that program is a winning lottery ticket. Make it through, and the worst life that awaits you is a tenured professorship, if not a Broadway and TV career.
- mtalantikite 5y agoYeah, exactly, Yale Drama is just one of those places that will make your career. There are certainly great actors out there that go on different paths, but Yale is going to give you an enormous advantage. Here is a list of some of their alumni: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Yale_School_of_Drama_alumni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Yale_School_of_Drama_...
- BB212 5y agoI disagree. They have a couple hundred students there at any time and the percent of people who will make an actual career from it is still relatively low. Way better than moving to Hollywood with no connections but it is still extremely winner take all.
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- strikelaserclaw 5y agoIt is a pretty interesting story, David Geffen apparently lied on his resume that he graduated from UCLA (he never even went there) to get a job in the mail room at WMA, from which point he moved up in the world. He also gave couple hundred million to UCLA once he became rich.
- sgpl 5y agoI was recently watching a commencement address [0] by Neil Gaiman (author) and he talks about lying about writing for certain publications to get writing jobs. In a similar tangent, he mentioned that he made it a point to write for those publications after the fact. Off the top of my head I recall Tom Ford (fashion) also kind of lied to get his first job in fashion. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OwRUyZMKwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OwRUyZMKwI
- akudha 5y agoI have friends who lied in their resume about the technologies they have experience with. They learn on the job. 9 times out of 10, this seems to work out. I never did. Those who lied are doing better than me. Now I feel like an idiot. I guess these kinds of lies are not that bad in the long run? This is more of a problem with the system than the candidates. This is a chicken and egg problem...
- ceilingcorner 5y agoThink of your resume as a list of things you can learn quickly, not a list of things you already know.
- akudha 5y agoYup, I learned that lesson very late in my career :(
- simonsarris 5y agoThis has a long history, Leonardo Da Vinci did the same thing with his letter to Ludovico Sforza (the Duke of Milan). Almost nothing he said he knew how to do were things he had done before (or would ever do). https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/leonardo-da-vincis-handwritten-resume-1482.html https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/leonardo-da-vincis-handw...
- havelhovel 5y agoAs someone who benefited from a similar act of generosity, I know this will be a life changing gift for those who have the talent but lack resources or connections to go far on their own. Many of our favorite entertainers come from this school. I look forward to many more.
- yboris 5y ago"Alternative headline: Man worth $10.2 billion who pays lower tax rate than you gets $150 million tax break to aid institution that has a $31 billion endowment" -- Dan Price https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/1410267944815403012 https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/14102679448154030...
- jacknews 5y agoTax Deductable? The thing about taxes, is that we all get to decide how they are spent, not just by the whim (or optics) of a single individual. In theory, at least.
- jws 5y agoThe thing about taxes, is that we all get to decide how they are spent… And we did. We defined a set of criterion for social goods to which a person can donate their income without it affecting their income tax.
- ffggvv 5y agoyale could afford to make tuition free for everyone in perpetuity using just their endowment.
- MaxHoppersGhost 5y agoGiving free tuition to a bunch of kids who probably already are extremely loaded seems like a waste. There are hundreds of colleges around the country that have low endowments and kids coming from disadvantaged backgrounds who will be in debt the rest of their lives. Further, tuition is way cheaper at these schools (like a fifth or a tenth) so you’d really be making an outsized impact. Donating to the Yales of the world is a massive ego booster/vanity project and a terrible use of funds.
- snicker7 5y ago"... the drama school plans to eliminate tuition for returning and future students, removing a barrier to entry for low-income students ..." No better way to end the cycle of poverty than ... a theater degree.
- jmole 5y agogetting into a top art school is one of the few, nearly guaranteed ways, to "make it" in the art world. the connections you get there enable even mediocre artists to make a real living out of making art.