Elite endowments sit untapped while schools pass costs to students

Evidence

A college’s endowment is the sum total of donations and income the college invests for its long-term future. It is like an enormous rainy-day fund, only a small portion of which goes toward educational activities and scholarships. The rest is invested to ensure the continued viability of the institution. (During the COVID-19 pandemic—a rainy-day event if ever there was one—wealthy institutions did not withdraw available funds from their endowments. They imposed salary and hiring freezes instead, along with student fee increases and layoffs.) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 265

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The COVID freeze-not-withdraw detail enriches the trees-as-infrastructure article’s theme of underused resources in a new domain.
• CANDY: Elite colleges froze salaries and raised fees during a pandemic rather than touch their endowments — a crisp, quotable fact.