It seems that Smith College is joining the colleges that seem to prioritize the size of the endowment at the expense of the school overall. Almost all decisions now are made to save money, for example the effort to close their preschool used by faculty, staff and students with children. Their repeated anti union stance. And today an announcement of the need to cut 45 staff/faculty positions because of a 12 million dollar budget shortfall. What exactly is this shortfall? Well seems like the endowment only increased half a billion, yes that is right 500 million dollars last year. I guess not enough for a school that prioritizes its endowment over its students. Just be careful if you are considering Smith.
Many businesses are cutting and many are anti union. BU had a $42 million revenue shortfall.
From Smith -
Spending from the endowment contributes 44% of Smith’s annual operating budget and serves as the college’s largest revenue source. It subsidizes the cost of a Smith education for every student, regardless of whether they are on financial aid.
I’m not a Smith family, but if your endowment is covering that much of your day to day, you need to be prudent.
Perhaps it’s just that - planning for longevity. Markets go up and down - and they simply might be adapting for the income the endowment creates vs. pulling off principal - which would be prudent.
Many schools are cutting - so it’s ok to evaluate Smith in that context but then make sure you do similarly with others - because you’ll likely find a similar story.
Good luck.
This is good advice. Every prospective student needs to determine which things are important to their educational experience and which ones are not. A college is merging three foreign language majors into one department-- if all you intend to do is take one semester of Spanish, continuing your HS progress-- the change isn’t likely to impact your education in any way. A college is selling off its archive of Lincoln ephemera-- if you aren’t interested in American History and have no intention of ever walking into the archive to examine the newspaper from Philadelphia which announced his assassination, it’s not likely to make a difference to you. And if the collection ends up at the Smithsonian, you can view it if you change your mind and decide you want to.
Folks get exercised over cuts. Nobody likes living on a budget. But the alternative is worse. So figure out what you care about and what’s meaningful to you. Colleges sell their art, sell off underutilized parking lots to private developers, de-accession their library holdings, etc. May not have any impact at all to an undergraduate.
Unfortunately, I think we are going to see things like this happen at a wide range of schools in the coming years. I just read that UCSF has started staff layoffs and many public universities in my state either have hiring freezes underway, are cutting faculty lines as people retire, are letting lecturers go and increasing faculty course loads, and/or are planning for faculty and staff layoffs. It’s only going to get worse.