<p>Only a handful of colleges have endowments large enought to even question. Yes this guy wants to know all about the inner workings over 10 years of over 100 schools. For private schools is this even public info? Seems very intrusive. </p>
<p>[Senators</a> Scrutinize Well-Endowed Colleges :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/25/senators]Senators”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/25/senators)</p>
<p>well, I don’t know. Is it wrong to look into? I don’t think so. Is it fair to take a sampling to start? Yea, I think so. It has to be small enough to do and large enough to represent. </p>
<p>there really is no such animal as private in america. any person, any business can be researched at anytime by uncle bucks. Sometimes without their knowledge. </p>
<p>When the information comes available can changes be forced by the government? yup. but more than likely schools will have a change of heart … similar to walmart “offerring” health benefits to employees, then advertising how they came to the conculsion it was good business to do so… better to “give” than have it “taken” or “mandated”. </p>
<p>Is it right? is it america? yup it really is.</p>
<p>Will the investigate the Gates Foundation, the art museum foundations, I hear some of them have nice offices and the pay is pretty good.</p>
<p>Barrons, these schools get many government dollars. Many of the students get money from the government that goes to these colleges. The schools endowment income is tax free.</p>
<p>A little scrutiny is like an audit.</p>
<p>Why not?</p>
<p>You don’t want to know what the government is getting for its money?</p>
<p>I’d like to know why we keep throwing money at education (both the private and public sectors) and our costs keep rising and rising.</p>
<p>Exactly. It starts becoming an interesting issue for the taxpayer when a well-endowed university like Harvard is getting taxpayer dollars for research, yet it has billions upon billions sitting in its coffers.</p>
<p>I am NOT criticizing Harvard for its success-- in fact, I think it’s great. However, we should know what they are doing with dollars coming out of all of our pockets.</p>
<p>All the research $$$ has its own very detailed accounting so they know to the penny where that goes. Everyone states and data indicates that kids using federal loans and aid to go to a school like Harvard are paying no more than a fraction of the actual cost of the education provided. What would we accomplish by taxing some of H’s income? The amount of $$ it would bring in would be a bare blip in the total federal income. After you get past H, Y, S and a couple others the numbers get much smaller so you really are looking at half a dozen super-rich schools.</p>
<p>Barrons, I think you need to find another issue. Really. </p>
<p>The government spends billions in student loans. </p>
<p>That reason is reason enough.</p>
<p>They already provide reams of data through IPEDS and numerous other required reports and tax returns. Most schools have to hire several people just to do the paperwork. From the COHE</p>
<p>"When the U.S. Senate’s education committee met last summer to consider legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, Sen. Lamar Alexander brought along a prop: five plastic boxes containing all the regulations that various iterations of the bill have created over the years. Stacked on top of each other, the black and blue boxes stood as tall as the former college president, who is an inch shy of six feet.</p>
<p>The message to his colleagues was clear: Colleges and universities are overburdened with federal regulations. If Congress wants new regulations, it should do away with some of the outdated ones first.</p>
<p>“These are all very well-meaning ideas,” said Mr. Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, “but we need a countervailing force of some kind.”</p>
<p>His appeal fell on deaf ears, and the committee approved a bill containing at least 152 new reporting requirements, according to an analysis by the American Council on Education. A companion bill in the U.S. House of Representatives contains 189.</p>
<p>The new mandates would force many institutions to hire staff members to help them comply, costing colleges millions of dollars at a time when Congress is pressuring institutions to hold the line on tuition.</p>
<p>Mr. Alexander and college lobbyists hope they can persuade Congress to eliminate or scale back some of the new requirements, but they know they are fighting an uphill battle. In Washington, where no one becomes famous for repealing laws or removing rules, all the forces add regulation. Once a rule is added to the books, inertia and interest groups make it almost impossible to remove.</p>
<p>“We almost never throw the trash out,” Mr. Alexander said in an interview. “We just bring in another trash basket and fill it up, too.”</p>
<p>‘Creeping Regulation’</p>
<p>What Mr. Alexander calls “the creeping regulation of higher education” began in the 1980s, when lawmakers added language to the Higher Education Act requiring colleges to disclose gifts from foreign sources. Since then, Congress has added hundreds of new reporting requirements, often in response to specific events. The deadly dormitory fire at Seton Hall University in 2000, for example, led Congress to propose a requirement that colleges annually disclose information about their fire safety.</p>
<p>Much of the data required of colleges is collected in a series of seven surveys that they must complete for the Education Department’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or Ipeds.</p>
<p>Peter M. Teitelbaum, assistant vice provost at New York University, says he has two full-time employees working on Ipeds reporting alone.</p>
<p>But the federal government’s oversight of colleges hardly ends with Ipeds. Nearly every federal agency imposes some regulatory burden on colleges, in areas as diverse as the protection of human subjects and the disposal of hazardous waste. While the government has no official estimate of how many regulations colleges face, the Catholic University of America, which tracks federal regulations, puts the number at roughly 200.</p>
<p>Most college officials say it is reasonable for Congress to place some conditions on the billions of dollars in aid that it sends to colleges. They will also concede that most federal regulations are worthwhile. Their principal complaint is that lawmakers don’t provide colleges with enough money to cover escalating compliance costs.</p>
<p>While the government reimburses colleges for some administrative costs related to research, it has not raised the cap above 26 percent of direct research costs since 1991. Many research universities’ expenses exceeded that cap years ago, and the institutions now bear the entire cost of complying with new regulations. In 2000 the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research group, issued a report estimating that colleges cover between 10 percent and 30 percent of the overhead costs associated with federally financed research projects, costing the institutions between $750-million and $1.5-billion annually.</p>
<p>Anthony P. DeCrappeo, president of the Council on Governmental Relations, says Congress is not living up to its end of the bargain.</p>
<p>“The whole idea of the government-university partnership is that the government is supposed to pay its fair share,” he says. “That’s no longer happening.”</p>
<p>A Deluge</p>
<p>With the introduction of the latest measures to renew the Higher Education Act, the slow drip of federal regulation is poised to become a flood.</p>
<p>One reason the bill contains so many new requirements is that renewal of the Higher Education Act is five years overdue. As a result, “there is a built-up demand for more reporting and record keeping,” says Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education.</p>
<p>Several of the new requirements take aim at conflicts of interest in federal student-loan programs, requiring institutions to justify their choice of preferred lenders and provide more disclosure about the terms those lenders offer. The provisions were prompted by last year’s investigation into the student-loan industry.</p>
<p>Other provisions confront the rising cost of a college education, requiring colleges to report detailed pricing information and convene “quality-efficiency task forces” when their tuition outpaces the national average. College officials say the cost-reporting requirements will drive up colleges’ costs, making it harder to restrain tuition growth.</p>
<p>“These requirements, among others, will undermine efforts to make college more affordable,” says Robert M. Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities. “Surely that’s not what Congress wants to achieve in this legislation.”</p>
<p>Some college officials say the new mandates would be particularly burdensome for smaller institutions, which tend to have less-sophisticated computer-compliance systems and fewer staff members than other colleges.</p>
<p>At Clark Atlanta University, Walter D. Broadnax, the president, just completed the painful process of cutting his work force from 1,100 to 700 to balance his institution’s budget. Now he worries he will have to add another full-time employee just to handle the new reporting requirements in the higher-education bill.</p>
<p>Seven years ago, efforts to reduce red tape appeared to be gaining momentum. Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon of California, who was then chairman of the House’s higher-education subcommittee, had created a Web page where colleges could identify regulations that they would like to see altered or eliminated and was vowing to introduce legislation to ease the burden on colleges. Colleges submitted more than 3,000 recommendations to the page.</p>
<p>But the promised bill never made it into law. When the bipartisan measure got to the House floor, Democrats defeated it, complaining that they were not allowed to offer amendments.</p>
<p>Colleges’ hopes for reduced regulation were temporarily renewed in 2005, when the Commission on the Future of Higher Education asked lawyers at Catholic University to produce an “issue paper” on the federal regulation of higher education. The paper’s recommendations made it into the commission’s final report but were left out of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’s “action plan.”</p>
<p>Margaret L. O’Donnell, one of the report’s authors, said Education Department staff members told her and her boss that nobody in Washington was interested in deregulating higher education. “We were told that Lamar Alexander was the only person — they made it sound like in the universe — who cared about the federal regulation of universities,” she said.</p>
<p>If the colleges don’t feel it is worth it, they can stop taking the money.</p>
<p>Barrons, I’m sorry. I’m not convinced.</p>
<p>Tuition is up twice the inflation rate for over 20 years.</p>
<p>A long time.</p>
<p>I don’t have a problem with the audit.</p>
<p>My father quit giving to his alma mater after he found out it had one of the richest endowments in the country, is one of the most expensive privates in the country, and not particularly generous with scholarships. He was under the silly impression that he had been giving his money to the school to be spent on students, not to sit in a bank.</p>
<p>Grandstanding Senator wastes colleges time</p>
<p>I spent 30 years in Washington, all of it working in and with the Congress. Grassley is not a grandstanding senator, it would probably be fair to say he is a little slow but grandstander he is not.</p>
<p>“Will the investigate the Gates Foundation, the art museum foundations, I hear some of them have nice offices and the pay is pretty good.”</p>
<p>Yup someday they probably will, if they aren’t doing so already. </p>
<p>Why do they do it? Because they can.
When can they do it? Anytime they want.
Who can they do it to? Anyone they want.
Who gave them the right? We did. </p>
<p>Ask someone whose land was lost by “eminate domain” Barrons, There is no private anything.</p>
<p>Remember Seattle’s stupid monorail plan? They confiscated properties all over Seattle at a price they set. The program flatlined…dead… they had all these properties left over. What they do? sell them back to the original owners at the “price” they forced the owners to take? NOPE, they sold them in the market and used the profits to paydown debt. Uncle bucks in all shapes and forms pretty much does what it wants.</p>
<p>You should have hired a good consultant. You don’t have to take their offer. You have rights including taking it to court. Our firm has worked with several clients to get them a fair price for their property. It does take time and some $$ so if it’s a modest amount it’s not worth it.</p>
<p>From what I understand, much of the “endowment” money isn’t taxed…so…</p>
<p>and it is quite a lot of $ we are talking about here, not penauts</p>
<p>“intrusive” - ah poor little colleges with billions in endownments, and much of it not taxed- and too bad for the poeple that GAVE them the money…who wonder what its being used for…intrusive? egad</p>
<p>“You should have hired a good consultant. You don’t have to take their offer. You have rights including taking it to court. Our firm has worked with several clients to get them a fair price for their property. It does take time and some $$ so if it’s a modest amount it’s not worth it.”</p>
<p>I’m north of stupid city, I mean seattle. And as you suggested these people did, it took a bit longer, but they lost. What was really crappy was when the plan was scrapped these same people had to step back into the market to repurchase their property at inhanced prices. When you are forced to sell even at a fair price… are your private rights protected? Some of those folks didn’t want to sell, they got a “fair” price, but not what they wanted…</p>
<p>I’m with barrons on this one.</p>
<p>While talking about the colleges with multi-billion dollar endowments makes good fuel for outraged voters, and amazing material for politicians who want airtime, at the heart of the issue anyone who is complaining about this is either incapable of understanding basic logical principles, or hasn’t taken the time to think it through yet.</p>
<p>Every college’s mission is to provide the best experience possible for its students. To this end, it is obviously in each college’s best interest to spend their endowment at as high a level as possible that will be sustainable into the future. Spending above that level results in eventual correction and a much lower of spending; spending below that is inefficient. Each college has entire departments of people dedicated to growing, managing and determining how much to spend from the endowment. These people are experts. They aren’t politicians looking for the next outrage issue and some airtime.</p>
<p>Nothing useful will come of this onerous audit except a bunch of wasted time and money. Congratulations government, congratulations voters. Think with your heads, not your asses, people.</p>
<p>“Think with your heads, not your asses, people.”</p>
<p>Gee… that was really necessary. Do you feel better about yourself now?</p>