<p>I am not sure what you mean by 25% increase in product but I think there is plenty of demand, way too much demand and more every year. While the declining acceptance rate may be artificial due to increase in number of applications per applicant, the echo boom and the increase in percentage of high school grads attending college are real.</p>
<p>The closest analogy I can think of is a very expensive restaurant that deliberately seats only a fraction of the customers it takes to break even and pays its sou chef out of the proceeds of a trust fund left by the owner’s great-great grandmother.</p>
<p>He is famous for having food all over his tie at luncheons! LOL. Larry always looked like he just finished or was about to begin a long nap. Hey, he did also alienate many female faculty and I think gets credit for a lot of the African Studies professors moving to Princeton. Other than that his resume is stellar! (?)</p>
<p>77 </p>
<p>with interest rates low, refinancing existing debt would seem a wise move.</p>
<p>82</p>
<p>I suspect much of harvards endowment has been built up relatively recently. They continue to get donations. </p>
<p>Yes, non profits operate differently from for profits.</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> Bonds Have to Adjust - WSJ.com](<a href=“Harvard Bonds Have to Adjust - WSJ”>Harvard Bonds Have to Adjust - WSJ)</p>
<p>I guess things didn’t work out so well for Harvard’s bond offering. I understand refinancing but about half the bond was for new debt.</p>
<p><a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?;
<p>better article</p>
<p>Waitlistman: His name might not be so stellar at Princeton.</p>
<p>85 nothing in either of those articles suggests that Harvard issued the bonds for any reasons other than those they said that harvard said.</p>
<p>The article said part of the proceeds were to be used to renovate Fogg auditorium and other capital projects. That is not re-financing.</p>
<p>^ True, it’s not re-financing, but I believe issuing bonds for major capital projects is pretty much standard operating procedure even when times are good. I wouldn’t read it as a sign of weakness on Harvard’s part.</p>
<p>Bc, I would agree to a point. In the “good old days” Universities would secure virtually all the money for capital projects from Donations-some still do. Harvard, under Mr. Summers, decided it didn’t need to do the dirty work of fundraising and began the process of borrowing to build which contributed to its problems. </p>
<p>On a different subject interesting meltdown of another formerly top 10 hedge fund:</p>
<p>[Falcone</a> says he can handle redemptions Hedge Funds - MarketWatch](<a href=“http://www.marketwatch.com/story/falcone-says-he-can-handle-goldman-redemption-2010-11-10-1923440]Falcone”>Falcone says he can handle redemptions - MarketWatch)</p>
<p>86 and 82, agreed. Is this Cornell West? I love you on Bill Maher…</p>
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<p>With the thought being that if the restaurant expanded to seat everyone clamoring for a table that they would cease to be a top restaurant and would instead turn into a huge cafeteria.</p>
<p>^^So, the bigger the college, the closer it is to being a cafeteria?</p>
<p>^^Not necessarily in all cases, but the trend is there. There are certainly exceptions in both directions - there are excellent large schools and crummy small schools. But to continue the restaurant analogy, it’s probably harder to maintain a 4 or 5 star Michelin rating when you are serving a thousand dinners per night to five hundred tables than it is to keep that level of quality going while serving fifteen dinners per night to ten tables.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>But, the large restaurant could have a bigger menu and cater to a wider variety of tastes than the tiny boutique restaurant, which is more likely to offer a selection of daily chef specials.</p>
<p>^^Which is one thing that makes Harvard so desirable. It is the “restaurant” that provides a huge menu with many specials that cater to a wide variety of tastes even though it has only relatively limited seating. And it does all this while still earning a 5 star quality rating year after year.</p>
<p>Any restaurant that fits that description will always have a long line out the door and a waiting list for a reservation.</p>
<p>The analogy is not quite apt. The college can keep adding faculty; the restaurant can only have one top chef. Each time one orders coq au vin at the restaurant it should taste the same; an intro to psych course can vary widely and all can be good.</p>
<p>The restaurant would need to make significant capital investment for equipment and a kitchen large enough to accommodate cooks. I know the college, too, adds building and equipment, but the teachers are the major resource, just as the chef is. It is much easier to expand a faculty and maintain quality than it is to control the quality of the meal.</p>
<p>Therefore, it is totally plausible that Harvard can provide teaching equal to Willisms with the added advantage of real cultural stars teaching lectures.</p>
<p>The restaurant is not so lucky.</p>
<p>(And I am a satisfied Williams parent; however, I am also objective and not an apologist for small schools.)</p>
<p>Or is it that Harvard might be more like “Le Cirque”. Maybe not a good analogy, but once you develop a brand name of its stature the food might sink a bit in many of the areas, especially the undergraduates who are focused on the basics like Spaghetti and Meat Sauce, or Rack of Lamb, maybe Filet Mignon, or Porcini Mushrooms are finding that the Lark’s tongue in Aspic is becoming more commonly served even though their young palates have only grasped the simplest combinations of wines, food and sauces. I love this restaurant analogy, you can not have a clue what you are talking about and yet you can say stuff that nobody would dare say directly. Too funny.
Okay, lets say you are focused on having the finest restaurant in the world but all of your chef’s are a bit aloof, do not get out and talk to the customers and are always busy trying to invent new dishes so they do not focus on the day to day operations of the restaurant much but the second line chefs do most of the cooking although the main chefs are always there the guests find them overpaid, overly in love with their reputations. In turn the restaurants managers are also taken with their success but find that the focus on the younger diners who order basic meals and are still slowly expanding their horizons find that its harder and harder to get a chef to come out and talk to them, to teach them what to try next. The managers of the restaurant come and go and seem to focus a lot on being sure the restaurant’s capital is there but to the point where it becomes a distraction and marketing has become one of the bigger reasons for success than the actual food quality, keeping that line of 35000 customers but only serving 3000 has become a legend of marketing scarcity. supply can never meet demand…hmm…
okay, so not saying this is exactly great analogy but in any case, clearly, a bigger restaurant that needs to be so many things to so many people in changing high tech times may find that the restaurants that really offer all foods for all people of the highest quality-such as the west coast California Cuisine restaurant somehow manages not only to serve up liberal arts dishes, great economic cuisine, fine arts platters, engineering buffets of the highest ratings, and yet not be a strip mall where any man named Ezra can eat any thing at any time, although some of the eateries are state run cafeterias! LOL. hmmm. I like my food, French and liberal like le revolution, I like a small restaurant with a dedicated staff paying attention to detail and I like it with focus on teaching my uneducated palate the basics and building on that and knowing the chef, assistant chef, head waiter, sommelier, souschef, and pattisier. This of course is becoming absurd but my point is I think that smaller <em>might</em> be better in many cases and that it’s easy to become distracted serving the high end customers focused on your exotic offerings and lose focus on the reason you went into the business, because you love to teach, errum I mean cook! Okay, bed time for bonzo. I could not resist the ibanker restaurant college discussion.</p>
<p>[U.S</a>. Pursues Sweeping Insider-Trading Probe - WSJ.com](<a href=“U.S. Pursues Sweeping Insider-Trading Probe - WSJ”>U.S. Pursues Sweeping Insider-Trading Probe - WSJ)</p>
<p>Interesting development in the wonderful and oh so ethical hedge fund industry that so many university endowments are supporting</p>
<p>“Meanwhile, New Jersey received substantially more capital calls than distributions during October, when it funded about $127.2 million in private equity and real estate commitments and received about $46.1 million from general partners”</p>
<p>Interesting comment from NJ pension fund-seems that liquidity is still a big problem.</p>
<p><a href=“http://blogs.wsj.com/privateequity/2010/11/18/pe-allocations-return-to-the-garden-state/[/url]”>http://blogs.wsj.com/privateequity/2010/11/18/pe-allocations-return-to-the-garden-state/</a></p>