<p>Harvard President Faust addressed the school’s financial situation (and many other topics) in her year-end message to the Harvard community. </p>
<p>Excerpt dealing with financials:</p>
<p>"Throughout the year, we have kept our focus on adjusting to our changed economic landscape. In the wake of the global financial crisis, we have reduced the amounts distributed from our endowment accounts by 8 percent for the academic year now ending, and by 12 percent for the year to come. We’ve had to cut costs in many parts of the university. But the exercise has involved much more than that. It has focused our attention on how we can deliver our programs and services in more disciplined and integrated ways — how we can seek out efficiencies through new combinations and ensure that our spending aligns with core academic priorities, especially during a period of unaccustomed constraint.</p>
<p>The challenge is not just to tamp down costs but to reimagine aspects of how we do our work, to make sure we embrace best practices and direct our resources to their highest and best use. For instance, we have made encouraging progress in a major effort to rethink organizational dimensions of our highly decentralized library system. We have an opportunity, and an obligation, to reconsider and rationalize how we administer one of Harvard’s greatest treasures and to renew it for an era of unprecedented change in how we collect, transmit, and preserve knowledge and information.</p>
<p>In the face of our economic challenges, it’s been a year when we have taken care to sustain our strong programs of student financial aid. Even as we have scrubbed our budgets, we have made it a priority to hold our doors open wide to students of ability and promise, whatever their economic means. And we have attracted outstanding applicants in record numbers. For the first time, applications to Harvard College surpassed 30,000, for approximately 1,650 places in the entering class. Applications climbed in nearly all of our graduate and professional schools, with numbers at or near historical highs in business, design, education, government, law, and medicine."</p>