I know that folks in EA often favor donating to more effective things rather than less effective things. With that in mind, I have mixed feelings knowing that many Harvard faculty are donating 10%, and that they are donating to the best funded and most prestigious university in the world.
On the one hand, it is really nice to know that they are willing to put their money where their mouth is when their institution is under attack. I get some warm fuzzy feelings from the idea of defending an education institution against political attacks. On the other hand, Harvard University’s endowment is already very large, and Harvard earns a lot of money each year. It is like a very tailored version of a giving pledge: giving to Harvard, giving for one year. Will such a relatively small amount given toward such a relatively large institution do much good? I do wonder what the impact would be if these fairly well-known and well-respected academics announced they were donating 10% to clean water, or to deworming, or to reducing animal suffering. I wonder how much their donations will do for Harvard.
I’ll include a few graphs to illustrate Harvard’s financial strength.
These are from a project I did several months ago using data from the Common Data Set, from College Scorecard, from their Form 990 tax filings, and some data from the college’s websites.
The selection of the non-Harvard schools is fairly arbitrary. For that particular project I just wanted to select a few different types of schools (small liberal arts, more technical focused, etc.) rather than comparing Harvard to other ‘hyper elite’ schools.
I left the endowment graph non-logarithmic just to illustrate the ludicrous difference. Yes, I know it is bad design practice and that it obscures the numbers for the non-Harvard schools.
I know that folks in EA often favor donating to more effective things rather than less effective things. With that in mind, I have mixed feelings knowing that many Harvard faculty are donating 10%, and that they are donating to the best funded and most prestigious university in the world.
On the one hand, it is really nice to know that they are willing to put their money where their mouth is when their institution is under attack. I get some warm fuzzy feelings from the idea of defending an education institution against political attacks. On the other hand, Harvard University’s endowment is already very large, and Harvard earns a lot of money each year. It is like a very tailored version of a giving pledge: giving to Harvard, giving for one year. Will such a relatively small amount given toward such a relatively large institution do much good? I do wonder what the impact would be if these fairly well-known and well-respected academics announced they were donating 10% to clean water, or to deworming, or to reducing animal suffering. I wonder how much their donations will do for Harvard.
I’ll include a few graphs to illustrate Harvard’s financial strength.
Some notes about the graphs:
These are from a project I did several months ago using data from the Common Data Set, from College Scorecard, from their Form 990 tax filings, and some data from the college’s websites.
The selection of the non-Harvard schools is fairly arbitrary. For that particular project I just wanted to select a few different types of schools (small liberal arts, more technical focused, etc.) rather than comparing Harvard to other ‘hyper elite’ schools.
I left the endowment graph non-logarithmic just to illustrate the ludicrous difference. Yes, I know it is bad design practice and that it obscures the numbers for the non-Harvard schools.