Second division team

Harvard

I never have understood why Harvard went coed. Lots of thanks they get. Carroll Bogert, Harvard alumna Class of 1983, in a May 25, 2008, NY Times op-ed piece, urges fellow Harvard alumni to enjoy reunions but “skip the check.”
Harvard could have stuck with all-male classes, mostly anglo, or mostly saxon, or possibly some combination of the two. Lots more thanks they would get. Last month David Rockefeller, Harvard alumnus Class of 1936, pledged $100 million, the largest gift in Harvard’s short and undistinguished history. So much for “skip the check.”
Intelligent alumna sees a problem with mushrooming, underutilized endowment; unconcerned alumnus, through eyelids heavy with single-malt, sees only his school colors underneath the cigar ashes on his tie, precariously balanced on the ridge line of his paunch, horizontally enfolded in the leather cushions of his club chair just off Fifth, amid paused reading of the Wall Street Journal, its open page barely held in the hand glacially slipping off the outer edge of the chair’s good right arm.
Are they stealing our signs?

Out of the Zone

Hobson's article misses the plate

The article entitled “Financial aid: Who wins?”, by Katherine Hobson ’94, in the May 14, 2008, Princeton Alumni Weekly discusses the “struggles” of a variety of colleges to “stay in the game”. The “game” is financial aid rules. The “struggle” is to keep pace with colleges, like Princeton, that are expanding the field of families that qualify for aid, and the amount of aid. The article is misleading. Its premises are that Princeton started the aid expansion by initiating “policy changes” in 2001, when it eliminated loans from student aid packages, and that Princeton now is one of a number of colleges that are seeking to construct aid packages in a way that will achieve evolving goals. This is misleading in two respects.
First, Princeton’s financial position is so unique that its policies and problems simply cannot be compared with those of any other college. I identified the problem, more than twelve years ago, in an “open letter” to Princetonians, as a “runaway endowment”. The simple fact of the matter is that with cautious investment and budgetary restraint Princeton could operate indefinitely without any student charges of any kind, whether the total number of undergraduates be 4,200 or 5,200. Few other colleges, if any, are in the same position, and for those that may be the proposition is far less clear than it is for Princeton. Consequently, for Princeton the issue is one of morality, not money. Ms. Hobson attributes to Princeton’s director of undergraduate financial aid the proposition that “families should pay if they are able”—an obvious morality judgment, and one that I don’t accept. For Princeton, unlike other colleges, the issue can be discussed only in these terms.
Second, financial aid cannot be discussed as if paying for a college education were a one-sided equation—that side being how to raise the money to pay the colleges’ charges. The other side is how to stop the super-inflationary increases in the colleges’ charges (“runaway budgets”). This is the more important side of the equation, because it is not being discussed, because the critical data is tightly guarded by the colleges, and because the potential benefit to students and their families exceeds what they can expect from tweaked financial aid packages. The data critical to this side of the equation is the ratio of employees (faculty and administration) to students, the amount of facility under-usage (vacation downtime), and the compensation paid per classroom hour (namely, an employee-by-employee list (omitting names, but indicating title or function), showing compensation paid (including benefits) and (for faculty) the number of classroom hours actually taught in the preceding year). Because the colleges are tax-exempt entities they have no legitimate reason for refusing to disclose this data.

Note: I have chosen to take the pun opportunities in Ms. Hobson’s pitch.