Howard University in Financial Distress

Hanna
Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:31:35 +0000

“Two employees for every student? Yikes!”

At Harvard, it’s about 1 to 1. The difference between Howard and Harvard is endowment size. The employee ratio, by itself, doesn’t tell you much about whether there’s waste and needless bureaucracy. If you can afford it, it makes sense to have huge research organizations, tons of student support people, many facilities people taking care of your historic buildings, lots of support staff for each professor, etc., etc. The problem is matching your services to what you can afford to provide, and making sure you aren’t spending money you don’t have on things you don’t really need. (Well, and making sure the top guys don’t have their hand in the till a la MBC, but I haven’t seen any indication that’s going on at Howard.)

This is a terrible shame. We need Howard.