To put this in perspective, if Bill Gates donated 1% of his wealth to my university, we could educate our 1800 students (the vast majority of whom are working or middle class) tuition-free...and not just next year, but for the next several decades.
Imagine the impact if Gates picked 100 universities like mine--small schools w/ faculties who really care abo teaching but wch don't have the ginormous endowments of historically-wealthy schools--and decided to enable 200,000 students per year to attend them at little or no cost.
Every year, insanely rich people like Gates give billions of dollars to elite universities that are already swimming in oceans of cash. Meanwhile, 98% of the institutions of higher ed in the US that educate the majority of students are struggling to make ends meet.
I remember being at a conference in Harvard a few years back and looking around the room, adding up the value of the objects in just that one room--a 30' X 20' 200 year old Persian rug, 100 Aeron chairs, a 250 year old Mahogany table, a wall-sized portrait of TR, etc.
You could almost fund my entire university for a year with the money you'd get from liquidating that one single room in one single building at Harvard. Don't worry, that's not what I'm advocating...I'm just saying, we're long overdue for a national reinvestment in education.
My students are amazing...& they're also really stressed because most of them are working to help pay for school and are incredibly worried about the debt load they will carry afterwards. Imagine what more they could contribute to the world w/o that fear hanging over them?
Another comparison 4 perspective's sake. Harvard's endowment is about $40 billion. You could fully fund my university (tuition-free) for 16 years w/ just 1 year of the *interest* Harvard makes on that endowment. And that's assuming a 4% draw, wch wouldn't even touch the principle
I've got no particular beef with Harvard. I'm just saying it's frustrating that people with money like Gates or Bloomberg (who just gave a ton of $$$ to Johns Hopkins with its $3.8 billion endowment) fail to see how much "bang for their buck" they could get by sharing the wealth.
