I would be careful about the second one, I am no expert on endowments and the rules around them but I am not sure that a school for example can easily dip into the capital in an endowment to make up for shortfalls, it depends on the rules around the endowment, some allow an institution to do that, others may not (and for the record, I don’t know about Harvard and its rules). The other thing to keep in mind is that the endowment likely took a major hit in the 2008 crunch, I know of several big name schools whose endowments lost 40% of their value, so it may not have been all that easy to dip into them, it would mean selling off assets at depreciated prices to ‘dip into them’, and that would mean a lot harder struggle when things got better to build the endowment to where it generates sufficient income to fund the various things it does, it isn’t like the endowment is this pile of dollar bills sitting in a safe, they are invested in the markets and such, and their value fluctuates with the markets themselves.