Except the donations he made that were quid pro quo that led him to prison?
Guardian article: "How did ‘less than stellar’ high school student Jared Kushner get into Harvard? "
“They are accepting money as tax deductible donation when in fact it’s a sale of admission, exchange of goods”
So true!
Isn’t disclosing a student’s academic record a violation of law? To be disclosed to a newspaper I mean, not when a transcript is needed for a job or grad school, etc.?
C’mon. No one here knows that his admission was quid pro quo. Golden suggests it and everyone jumps.
I don’t see his academic record. Nor his app. We’re talking about 1998, almost 20 years ago.
BTW, Allston notwithstanding, the budget is a target percentage of growth. Harvard doesn’t “live year to year.”
@lookingforward: "Musicprnt, it says ‘pledged.’ "
I noticed that same thing, and back tracked to re-read. I found that to be suggestive, but not determinative of what may have actually been given.
That doesn’t mean there was no abuse. They are too sophisticated to get caught and produce Wall Street that aiso too big to fall. It’s not just the initial $2.5M that evaded taxes. Since $2.5M was gained through a for-profit activity, all gains brought in by the intial amount would be taxable. I think it’s time we reconsider nonprofit thing. Is the enormous tax advantage at Harvard justified when State Us are starving for fund? If Harvard’s $38 billion endowment is all in stocks that produce the standard 2% dividends, that alone would be $760 million dollar annual income that’s is tax exempt or at 30% tax rate, Harvard is getting about $250 million dollars from tax payers. We are funding them at least $250 million dollars. Do you call that “private” university? It seems to me they are more public than a state uni.
Well better than 2%. But much of this is a topic for another thread. No one, including Golden, knows he bought his kid a seat.
Not really, Harvard’s endowment is so large that they could in fact reduce tuition to zero for years, with no impact on education or research. (However, that would be a dumb policy. Why make tuition free for the scion of a wealthy one-percenter?)
@Iglooo, I’ll take issue with a couple of your points.
First of all, neither you nor anyone else can demonstrate that “2.5M was gained through a for-profit activity”. If Kushner were a clearly unacceptable candidate, and Harvard explicitly broke rules to admit him, and, most importantly, Harvard were a profit-making business that made money by doing this, you might be able to make a statement like that, but none of those things is true.
We - you, me, his high school guidance counselor, teachers and classmates and everyone else not on the Harvard admissions committee at the time - don’t know what was in Kushner’s file, but there is no evidence to suggest that he was an unacceptable candidate. He may - may - have had lower stats than some in his high school class - so what? Do you know anything about the applications of those kids, or why Harvard should have wanted them more than Kushner? Do you know who they are, or even if they exist?
Personally, I’d be willing to bet Kushner had higher stats than a not-insignificant number of his Harvard classmates, but the truth is, we’ll never know, and it makes very little difference anyway. There’s a lot more to applications than stats, as I, @lookingforward and others have frequently pointed out. Even if you were sitting in the room as the admissions committee was discussing Kushner’s case, I doubt you would have heard anyone say that this kid was unacceptable but we need to take him anyway, because he almost certainly wasn’t unacceptable by Harvard’s standards. Apart from academic or other dishonesty / criminal activity, I think there are very few hard-and-fast rules that automatically disqualify a candidate, and I haven’t heard a suggestion Kushner broke any of them.
As has been said more than once, Harvard is not a profitmaking business. There aren’t Harvard stockholders getting rich. When Harvard gets money, from tuition, grants, endowment income or gifts, they spend it on educating people. The only people who gained from the Kushner donation (assuming it happened as described) were the students whose education benefited from it (and may have received financial aid as a result of it), the faculty and staff who were paid to provide this education, and society at large, which (at least theoretically) benefits from having some of its members receive a Harvard education.
Second, and related to the above, Harvard is not “getting about $250 million dollars from tax payers” any more than another charity or nonprofit that received $760 million in donations and didn’t pay tax on it got that amount. Universities are nonprofits. Educational institutions that are nonprofits receive the same tax treatment as other nonprofits. You seem to think that once an educational institution achieves a certain size, its income should be taxed - that somehow what Harvard does with its endowment income is less pure than what a much smaller university does with theirs. Again, take a look at what Harvard does with its income: they run one of the greatest universities in the world, with an enormous spread of departments and programs, educating over 20,000 students a year (including 6,700 undergrads) to become leaders in their fields and society as a whole and, according to their website:
If you don’t find that admirable, and think Harvard’s a money-grubbing enterprise selling spots to enrich itself, well, we’re never going to agree.
Did I say they are too sophisticated to get caught? They will never do quid pro quo of course. Does that mean it doesn’t exist? We know there are “pimps” matching money ti institutions. We also know “fair market value” for such exchanges. This is kind of argument that breeds mistrust. We know it exists. Pinpointing is another matter. That does not expunge what they do. If you don’t accept that, there’s no point talkig to you.
About money well spent, is there anyone who couldn’t spend money better than paying taxes? I know I will do a lot better with my tax money if I get to keep it. Maybe you are not one of them. I don’t know you.
@bluebayou unfortunately, that’s not the case. The Harvard endowment isn’t a big pot of money somewhere that can turn on a dime; it’s more than 13,000 separate accounts, 80% of which are specifically designated to one of Harvard’s twelve schools. Only about 30% of the endowment is unrestricted, for the university to spend as it likes. Harvard can’t just raid the medical school’s endowment to support financial aid for undergraduates, for example.
Spending from the endowment accounts for over a third of the university’s operating budget. If all of a sudden the university wanted to spend hundreds of millions more on financial aid, I’m not sure they could find the money easily. Bear in mind too that the university has a lot of ongoing spending plans and multi-year growth initiatives in various areas which rely on endowment spending and would grind to a halt if priorities were reoriented in this way. Also, endowment spending power is premised on gifts / capital campaigns and endowment investment performance (which last year was negative, by the way).
Aah, come on. Calling it pimping gets a rise but gets you no closer to reality. It seems many on CC just can’t believe a rich kid can get turned down. As if.
Oddly, on this same forum, people gush that 80% are “qualified.” Or do they only mean the middle class? The rest either buy (including full freight) or are given a break for diversity??? Sheesh.
Is this a rhetorical question? I think Harvard will, in fact, admit any kid of a billionaire if they have stats that are in the ballpark for being able to graduate from Harvard. Why wouldn’t they?
I do have to say that I find it refreshing to see folks on CC deconstructing a rich kid’s possibly “unfair” admission to Harvard instead of that of a URM.
Benjamin Brafman, Mr. Kushner’s lead lawyer, said that while he was pleased that Judge Linares did not throw out the original plea deal’s sentencing recommendations, he was “angry and disappointed” that the judge chose not to sentence his client to 18 months in prison.
“It disappoints me because I thought that after years of being one of the kindest and giving persons, it would matter in this state,” Mr. Brafman said. “It does matter in other states, but apparently it doesn’t mean anything in this state.”
Mr. Kushner’s lawyers provided Judge Linares with about 700 letters praising Mr. Kushner’s charity and philanthropy, among them letters from people who had benefited from Mr. Kushner’s acts, including schoolchildren and the sick.
In the end he received a 2 year sentence…
So bribing to get what he wanted seems to have been in his DNA. Harvard took the bait and his two kids.
People ran this year for Harvard’s Board of Overseers on an “end tuition” platform.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/1/15/outsider-overseers-tuition-admissions/
Back of the envelope calculations from the link below shows about $181 million per year in tuition from full pay families and $44.2 million from scholarship kids (about $225.2 million total per year in tuition from undergrads). Harvard would earn $370 million with a 1% return on its endowment. Pretty sure their targeted return is a significant amount higher than that.
http://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance
Harvard could go tuition free if they wanted to. But why would they want to? They have about 45% of families paying full freight. If they thought they were losing out on kids who they want because of limited scholarships (there are some families who would qualify for $0 in aid who could never afford the school), they presumably would increase scholarship thresholds rather than going tuition free (believe that is what they have done already). Though at some point, the full freight kids get small enough the tuition becomes something of a rounding error (particularly as the endowment increases in size).
BTW, Harvard isn’t unique in regards to admitting people based on donations from what I understand. I have heard unofficial numbers for a number of top institutions in terms of family contributions needed to gain admission. From what I understand, you just need to be in the ballpark with reasonable stats/background and hit that threshold for donations.
Why not tax their endowment? Or fine schools with large endowments that accept bribes for admission?
@Iglooo, I’m sorry, but you continue to miss the point I made earlier. Harvard wants to maintain and grow one of the greatest universities in the world, and educate future leaders of society. They have to make decisions about where to allocate a finite pie of resources: hire faculty, establish programs, cover more financial aid for more students, build and refurbish facilities (some of the Houses haven’t been renovated in about 80 years, by the way - not everything’s gold-plated in Cambridge). Some of these decisions are made in response to competitive pressures: if they don’t want to lose out to Stanford, they have to beef up engineering and applied science, for example; they have to offer comparable amounts of financial aid as their peers to similarly-situated students.
The other difficult set of decisions they have to make regarding the allocation of a finite pie of resources is the 2,000 or so admits to Harvard College they hand out each year. If Harvard can choose to allocate one of those spots to an acceptable candidate who Harvard thinks it can help prepare to accomplish significant things in the world and, who, by the way, will bring millions in donations that Harvard can use to help satisfy all its other priorities (including providing financial aid to the best and most deserving underprivileged applicants), is it really appropriate for you to tell them that they’re corrupt and working with “pimps”? I don’t think so. Frankly, I might have made the same call. Let’s take it a step further: if Harvard could admit one low-stats kid on the understanding that his family would donate $100 million, I’d probably recommend they do that too, because of all the good that money would do for everyone else. I’d be excited about how that would help me attract the best kids to fill the other 1,999 slots.
Acknowledging that there are trade-offs in running a large and diverse university which is trying to attract and educate future leaders of all kinds is not the same as saying that the system is inherently corrupt. It’s just a zero-sum game full of hard choices. And if you don’t think large universities should be nonprofits, I suggest you write your Congressman and try to get the tax code changed.
@DeepBlue86
So if the money was right, Harvard should accept an unqualified child of a brutal dictator, child pornographer, or any other horrific person that could bribe their child in for admission?
“As all the good that money would do for everyone else”
What if instead, rather than be taxed, Harvard voluntarily created a fund in which they would donate 1% of their endowment to each year. That fund could help build new public schools in the poorest communities around the country. Or replicate the model of the Milton Hershey School, but in different parts of the country. Dedicate and fund research to cure a disease that impacts learning. Invest to create and distribute new technology to modernize the learning experience in the poorest communities.
Those would be some examples of “doing good for everyone else” - and way beyond impacting a few kids on a single college campus,
@ClarinetDad16 probably not, for the same reason that they’d decline a donation from that person made on the condition that a building be named after them - there are some people the university doesn’t want to be associated with. It would be a more interesting question if the kid were highly qualified and otherwise desirable, but tainted by her parents.
Re: building public schools, that’s not Harvard’s mission, and I doubt the students, faculty, staff or alumni would be supportive if it were spelled out what would no longer be possible to fund at Harvard as a result.
@saillakeerie, Harvard didn’t earn a 1% return on their endowment last year - they lost 2%. What do you do in this circumstance? Make everyone pay tuition again? Or just cut more somewhere else, which is what you had to do in the first place, because it’s a finite pie.
Actually, an interesting point your comment glances at is: when should Harvard feel obligated to expand enrollment? It would come at a huge cost for incremental housing, faculty and services in order to maintain the same standards. Yale is doing it now.