How did Columbia end up so poor?

natsherman
Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:36:37 +0000

Relative to its peers, I mean.

A $6 billion endowment sounds like a lot, but is a trifle compared to the resources of its principal competitors. We don’t know the numbers post-meltdown, but before the recent financial collapse, Harvard had $36 billion; Yale had $23 billion; Princeton and Stanford each had around $17 billion.

You can’t blame it on longevity – Columbia is roughly as old as Yale and Princeton and over twice as old as Stanford.

You can’t blame it on size – with 24,000 students, Columbia is roughly as big as Harvard, twice as big as Yale and 3 times as big as Princeton.

And Columbia is located in New York City, which for most of the past 100+ years, has had the world’s largest concentration of wealth.

Like its peers, Columbia has an amazing roster of alumni in all fields (including, obviously, our current President). Are they just cheapskates unwilling to support their alma mater, or has Columbia just been particularly incompetent in managing the largesse of their alumni corps?

What the hell happened? Are alumni just not as enthusiastic about their experience there?