<p>To all you Princeton Tigers, you need to talk your administration into getting a B-school, so you can LEARN HOW TO READ A FINANCIAL STATEMENT. The universities are reporting on a fiscal year ended june 30, BEFORE the crash. WANT TO BET THAT THEY ARE DOWN 40 to 50% since then? Basically, the real big endowments, including Princeton’s, are hedge funds and the slightly smaller ones invest in hedge funds. So, like all of the hedge funds, which are unregulated, these colleges not only contributed to the bubble but also hastened and depened the collapse by short selling in an attempt to recoup losses. College endowments are now selling off the most liquid of investments, at the bottom, to pay operating commitments (including their salaries, and to pay capital calls on the illiquid ones. They are also seeking to dump the illiquid investments at huge losses.</p>
<p>Everyone would have been much better off if they had invested conservatively and responsibly and actually used the endowments more instead of hoarding them. But too many of these college bureacrats used the increases in the endowments to justify increasing their salaries and staffs.</p>