Campus Affairs

Err…AmhPub, rather?

Actually, those of you who have taken a class with Professor Pavel Machala will recognize the title: neocon-turned-Obamacon Francis Fukuyama famously declared that the end of the Cold War represented the end of history, at least in the sense of ideological competition.  Well, there’s been a bunch of history since then, and guess what: we’re going to have some more.  Similarly, I’d caution against declaring the end of AmhPub.

It’s no secret that AmhPub - after an incredibly strong, hyped, and well-publicized start last year - has dropped precipitously during the summer/semester in terms of popularity, posts, views, editing, site development, etc. etc..  AmhPub is pretty much as close to dead as you can get.  Major ghost town.

What happened?  Certainly a combination of circumstances - basically, however, things just kind of fell apart.  It’s possible that Amherst simply isn’t ready for something like AmhPub yet.  You have to answer two questions:

1. Are the readers ready to change decades-old habits?  Amherst students have been reading the campus publications in Val for years.  Can we get folks to check AmhPub like they check the New York Times online, Gawker, or ESPN.com?
2. Are the writers ready to branch out from the security blankets of layout and copy editors?  Could Amherst students really decide that AmhPub was a worthwhile endeavor?  Is there even room for AmhPub with The Student, The Indicator, and a bunch of other revolving publications?

I’m not sure what the answers are to these questions.  I think that - eventually - something like AmhPub is an inevitability.  But maybe we aren’t ready yet; maybe AmhPub will fizzle and join the likes of PlanWorld (some creepy ‘05 is reading this and pounding his fist on the table) and The New Athenian.

Or maybe not.  It turns out that Sam Grausz ‘09, Erik Andrews ‘09, and Jimmy Laff ‘09 [the creators of this website] are trying to turn the reigns over to our friend Woody Brown ‘11.  This is a good move - Woody was the youngest and second-best-looking-male-staff-writer at AmhPub.  The most telling sign of AmhPub’s demise is that not a single first-year has posted.  Woody’s the only dude with a shot at fixing that.  But he’s got his work cut out for him.

On a personal note, I’ll be leaving campus next semester para estudiar en el extranjero.  Yea, that’s right - I’m going to Buenos Aires.  Get jealous.  I will, of course, cease writing a blog on Campus Affairs.  Hopefully, I’ll stay involved with the site through personal blogging or in some other capacity.  Meanwhile, I’d like to thank you all for reading.  I’ve had a lot of fun over the past couple semesters.

I’d like to offer Woody and the AmhPub world some suggestions before I go.  I’m not sure how feasible any of these ideas are, but I think some of them could be of use.  Needless to say, Woody will have to recruit some developers like Jimmy and Erik with serious techology knowhow.  Any comp sci majors or other code-literate students should absolutely get in touch.

• Move from a “e-zine” format (e.g. Slate) to a more traditional group blog format (e.g. DailyKos).  A new post would simply go above the previous.  Consider the “There’s More” function of fivethirtyeight.com to ensure assessibility and ease of use.
• Recruit way more staff writers - say, 30 or 40.  Make sure half of them are first-years.  Scrap the idea of focused blogs on individual topics.  Instead, require each staff writer to write just one post per week of any length on any topic they choose.  It could be a single sentence: “Teh food at Val sux lolz!” or it could be a 3,000 word essay explaining the political situation in Somalia.  Such an approach would assure new material every day on relevant and interesting topics.
• Find a way to advertise.  Once people start writing, we need to let students know the site exists.
• Encourage comments.  You’re reading this right now, but you won’t comment because no one else has.  This leads other people to think that no one is reading it, discouraging them from commenting.  And so the vicious cycle continues.  Also, commenting - along with instantaneous publishing - is really what sets blogging apart from traditional media.

Good luck, Woody.  I hope you can pull it off.  I’m sure I’ll be back here soon enough, but until then:

¡Hasta luego, amigos!

Well, where to begin?  I suppose that I should make it clear right now - I’m not about to bash Program Board.  They’re doing a fine job; they reformed the voting process, are working tirelessly for your benefit, and have exponentially multiplied their level of transparency.  Nevertheless, I’d like to make a few points.

PB should be commended for putting price tags next to the artists.  Now we know that MGMT is a (relatively) cheap buy.  But this information is still completely misleading.  Here’s the thing: T-Pain charges $50,000 for this type of event.  However, we still have to pay anywhere from $20,000 to $30,000 on top of that for production costs (security, equipment, etc.).  Now, you can argue that - since that cost is the same regardless of artist - this is irrelevant information.  Wrong.  I might think that T-Pain is worth $50K but not $70K.  My voting could (and should) reflect that.

Which brings me to my next point - the incentives this type of process creates are entirely misplaced.  We choose not to treat this money as if it were ours.  I’ve noted on several occasions that - were the price tag to be broken down per student - most students would be reluctant to pay $70 to see 3EB.  Were we truly weighting our votes by the price tag of the artists, we would observe no correlation between price and number of votes.

So - to test this possibility - I ran a regression between votes and cost in thousands of dollars.  When the price given was a range, I took the mean of the two extremes.  Turns out that there is a moderate linear correlation of .43.  Here’s the graph I made, including the best-fit line:

This actually isn’t, given the circumstances, that bad.  But it still represents skewed incentives.  Unlike Amherst, Williams College addresses this problem - they make each student pay for a ticket.  But AAS policy requires that every activity be equally available to every student.  So we completely socialize the process.  I think our way is fair and probably the right way to do it.  Nevertheless, the downside still exists and we should be aware of it.

If the name of the game is to maximize votes per dollar, our artist this Spring should unambiguously be MGMT.  From a musical perspective, I think The Roots would probably please the most people.  They provide a nice compromise for those who like listening to a band and for those who like rap or hip-hop.  Plus, they probably have the best musicians out of the list, so we would at least maximize talent per dollar.

But the student body will have the chance to decide soon enough.  The way I understand it, the next vote will allow every student to rank a first, second, and third for the nine options.  If one band fails to gain a majority of first place votes (and it won’t), then second place votes are counted, followed by third place votes.  Which, of course, makes absolutely no sense.  Third place votes could count as much as first place votes.

We could model this vote on the Heisman - 3 points for 1st, 2 for 2nd, 1 for 3rd.  Total the points and you have your winner.  Even better, why not take a page out of MLB’s MVP voting and have every student rank all 9 bands?  1st place would get 9 points, 9th place would get 1 point, etc.  This method would most accurately judge how the most people will be the most satisfied by the selection.

My take: we should not have this concert.  On a normal year, it’s not worth the money we spend.  But this year - in light of the College’s financial situation - it just seems plain wrong.  Spending $90,000 to bring Ludacris to campus is, well, ludicrous.  I understand that it’s our money; it comes straight from the Student Activities Fee we pay every year.  But surely there are things that we could be spending it on that are more meaningful.  I know there are some people that agree with me.  But until PB - in conjunction with AAS - makes this option a reality, we’re fighting a losing battle.

Ron Lieber of the New York Times: (any relation to Dean Ben, do you think?)

To me, the best pitch of all would invoke a specific debt. Universities tend not to remind alumni of the precise sum of their four or more years of scholarships. It would look too much like a bill. But I should be able to request that information, in today’s dollars, if I want to try to make it up and then some over my lifetime.

Though I don’t yet have as much control over my modest donation as I would like, I still intend to allocate the same percentage of my giving this year to my high school and college as I have in years past. And I think that every other former scholarship student has the same obligation to throw the rope back for others.

Do the schools want to state it this bluntly? Mr. Marx grew silent when I asked him this. He finally offered up the fact that even the full tuition charges do not come close to the costs for each student of running a college like Amherst. “I think every student, in that sense, is on financial aid,” he said.

Ms. Morey added, “I think one has more of a responsibility to be philanthropic in some way in their life” if they received aid from their college. “When I meet people who feel like they don’t want to support Amherst, I walk away just hoping that they’re giving to something. They were given an opportunity because of somebody else’s generosity, and it’s nice to think that’s going around and around.”

My answer?  Absolutely not.  Students with poor parents shouldn’t be expected to donate more after graduation than those of us with rich parents.  What’s the sense in that?  The whole point of financial aid is to level the playing field, even if we don’t always reach that ideal.  I would argue that we all have a responsibility to give back - not just to Amherst, but to the world.  It’s up to you to figure out how.

• Congratulations to new the Student Editor-in-Chiefs Robyn Bahr and Haley Castro.  The first issue is fantastic; I’ll be commenting on a bunch of goodies from the issue.  Kudos as well to the new Indicator EICs Karl Teo Molin and David Vaimberg.  Looking forward, boys!

• President Marx:

We have something like one-third less endowment and so we have to think harder about our situation…If we keep spending at the rate we’re spending, then we are on a trajectory that’s not sustainable in the long term.

The news just keeps getting worse and worse.  We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in just four or five months.  We’re losing on average anywhere from $3 to $4 million dollars every day.  Absolutely stunning.

• The Food Dude:

Every semester, Valentine gives us the option to forego breakfast in lieu of a fat Benjamin’s worth of AC Dollars. What they bury in the fine print however (by which I mean a large table on the back), is that you can still purchase breakfast at Val, for a measly three bucks. So unless you eat breakfast at Val 34 times or more per semester, you’re coming out ahead. Morning people need not worry, as they can get bagels and all the rest on the cheap at Schwemm’s with their AC fortunes. The fact is, anyone who’s not sitting down to 34 large morning meals every four months should take this deal. As a bonus for those who are bad at rationing, your excess AC dollars can be used to buy out the store at Schwemm’s come May or December. I have personally returned home with a veritable bevy of chips and salsa at each semester’s close.

Word, Dude!  I said the same thing in September, minus the part about the “veritable bevy.”

• Jonathan Thrope:

Even before Barack Obama was elected President a few weeks ago, rumors were circulating that College President Anthony Marx was in the running to be Obama’s Secretary of Education. Now that Obama has been elected, additional students have picked up on those rumors, most recently in The Indicator. According to Marx, however, there is no truth to them. “I have the most amazing job I can imagine and I don’t have plans to leave it,” he remarked. “[In Washington D.C.], there are a lot more rumors than positions … I certainly don’t anticipate taking the position.”

Let’s be clear, guys.  There were never rumors that President Marx was in the running for Secretary of Education.  The only time his name had been mentioned was in a suggestion by the non-influential American Association of University Professors [detailed here by Inside Higher Ed].  My prediction for Marx’s next job: Tony will turn down the Presidency of Dartmouth only to take the gig at Columbia when the embattled Lee Bollinger decides to move on.

• The Student Editorial Board:

Interterm, the three-week period between the end of Winter Recess and the start of the spring semester, is supposed to allow students to explore opportunities and interests outside the normal class regimen. Although the College attempts to provide a combination of not-for-credit courses, colloquia, special events and outings, it is hard to believe that many students will return to campus to take a class on Microsoft Excel or to attend the weekly bowling night.

Spot on.  Even with the the economy as it is, the Interterm offerings are awful.

• Claire Rann ‘08 writes in The Indicator that The Indicator should be put online.  I’d link to her article, of course, but irony of ironies, it’s not online!  She manages to insult AmhPub, The Student, and even The Indicator in one article.  Now that takes talent!

• There’s been a lot of recent criticism directed at the CCE.  I think some of it is probably valid, but from a personal standpoint the CCE has been fairly useful.  In President Marx’s letter, it was singled out for a “review” of the “pace of program development.”  But like it or not, the CCE is here (at least for another semester) and we should focus efforts on improving its weak points rather than wishing that it weren’t here.

• Speaking of the letter, why wasn’t it released to the students?  It’s frustrating when I hear about College policy from this guy.  If something is confidential, then it’s confidential.  This clearly wasn’t, so don’t try to keep it from us.  By the way, wasn’t Marx’s rejection of a hiring freeze eerily reminiscent of Barack Obama’s rejection of a spending freeze?  Both want to use a scalpel rather than a hatchet.  Hey, maybe Marx would be a good Secretary of Education after all.

• Get ready for this year’s Spring Concert controversy.  Kudos to Program Board for publicizing an open initial meeting to talk about options.  But I’d like to remind them that the voting process needs reform.  The options (including the total amount of funding going to the event) need to be explained thoroughly.  And the final vote should be a runoff between two - not three - candidates.  I’d like to propose another option that could be voted on: instead of having a concert, every student would get their share of the concert fee returned by check or cash.  Wouldn’t you prefer $60 in your pocket over a ticket to 3EB?

Happy Thanksgiving, guys.

Professor Hadley Arkes is looking at real estate in Malta:

After the election: I’ve been on the internet, looking at real estate in … Malta. Just think, a four-bedroom townhouse, near the new marina, in Zabbar, $350,000 USD (asking). Hmm. It is not only that the outcome of our election portends a moral disaster at several levels. It is that the people around us, our fellow citizens, the people with whom we share control over our lives, have taken leave of their sober judgment, if they had possessed any. For they seemed willing to drift happily into the camp of a candidate who is at odds with what most of them profess to favor.

Well OK, Professor, but maybe you should check out this map first.  I hear that Iraq, Cuba, Algeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo are all nice….

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Professor Arkes, both as an educator and as an intellectual.  I don’t think I’ve had another professor so engaged in the scholarship or thought process of his students.  His presence on campus is invaluable, so I’d encourage him to stop thinking about Malta and stay right where he is.  But I’m not sure that I can buy this argument:

One survey has about 80 per cent of the public opposed to the prospect of removing the secret ballot for workers in deciding on a union. And yet, Obama, receiving firm backing from the AFL-CIO, voted in favor of that policy. Most people in the country would take seriously the points made by Justice Scalia on detainees at Guantamo: that “at least thirty of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield,” and that it is wrong to put in control of the battlefield unelected judges, who have no responsibility to the people whose lives are at stake. And yet Barack Obama welcomed the decision in the Boumediene case to put the military under the control of judges.

We could go across the board, through the issues of policy, whether health insurance, taxes, or the authority of the government to track the calls connected to a terrorist network. On one issue after another, the public seemed willing to vote for a man whose positions were quite at odds with their own.

Look - hundreds of polls are taken every month, and every Nate Silver reader knows that data are only meaningful if you don’t cherry pick your polls.  But most of these claims don’t hold water anyway.  Americans routinely poll in favor in favor of habeas corpus rights at Guantanamo, affordable health care for all, lower taxes for the middle class, and the termination of warantless wiretapping.

The point is, you can manufacture any type of argument about this stuff however you want.  So I won’t attempt to do it.  But perhaps the best proof that Americans weren’t simply blinded by Obama’s charm and good looks is that they voted an additional 6-9 Democrats to the Senate and 20 Democrats to the House.  This would indicate that the American public is currently better aligned with the Democratic agenda than the Republican one.

But what’s striking to me - given Prof. Arkes’ background as one of the top natural law thinkers in the world - is that he’d rely on an argument predicated on the current public opinion.  This type of justification is usually postulated by moral relativists.  But Professor Arkes surely knows that owning black slaves used to be pretty popular too.  He’s actually witnessed the radical change in popular opinion on issues of segregation and civil rights.  Though I didn’t always reach the intended conclusions in my Political Obligations class, I found myself strangely attracted to natural law theory.  Because - regardless of what the public thinks - if slavery is wrong then it is always wrong.

Which is why I don’t care much for using polls on social or “moral” issues as justification for policy.  But in some cases I suppose they may help us understand a situation better.  Professor Arkes:

Obama brought out a massive black vote, and in California that vote produced a split of 70-30 in favor of a constitutional amendment to secure traditional marriage and reject same-sex marriage…In other words, we learn again that issues such as marriage, abortion, and the rejection of racial preferences are for the most part net winners. And we learn the lesson anew with a Republican leadership at the national level that is ever reluctant to receive the lesson.

He neglects to mention another part of the very same poll: voters under the age of 29 voted “No” on Proposition 8 by a stunning margin of 22 points.  So when Professor Arkes scolds the Republican leadership for it’s alleged reluctance to embrace a social issue like same-sex marriage, he should remember that the GOP has its future to think of.  Either it will have to move away from that ideology (see Charles M. Blow for details) or find a way to convince young voters that their views are misguided.

Of course - on this issue - Malta (which has universal health care, by the way) would be a fairly safe choice.  According to a recent poll, only 18% of Malta’s population favors same-sex marriage.

Or, at least, their corporate merger code names are:

In the case of Yahoo’s merger talks with AOL, which are ongoing, the pair seem to be aiming for a tony image, using the names of two upscale institutions of higher education: Yale University and Amherst College.

Why? Obviously, the first letter of each school corresponds with the name of each company, but BoomTown could not discern the mystery.

AOL is a real dinosaur in the tech world.  I don’t have enough of an understanding of the industry to explain its ineptitude - was the problem a poor business model, bad leadership, an inability to adapt to the changing nature of the internet, or some combination of the three?

In any case, I would prefer if Amherst were compared to Google: trendy, fun, smart, and a participant in the fight against bigotry and injustice.

Although some disgruntled Paulites may disagree with me, I’d like to encourage all local voters to excercise their civic duty today and get to the polls.  If you’re a student, your polling location is:

Bangs Community Center

70 Boltwood Walk

Good luck, and remember to vote!

I’ve been getting behind lately, but I think a roundup of the last week or so is necessary.

• President Marx sent out the campus-wide email and press statement:

College and university endowments across the country have been significantly affected by market volatility in recent weeks, and Amherst’s is no exception. Even with our relatively strong investment management, the endowment has lost roughly a quarter of its value since June 30. While these recent developments certainly demand our attention, the College has benefited from several years of strong endowment performance and has been prudent with its spending during that time.  This puts the College in a strong condition relative to many of our peers.

I’d like to apologize for some borderline-insensitive comments I made a few weeks ago.  It simply never occurred to me that we could lose $425 million dollars in 4 months (coincidentally, about as much as the new Comprehensive Campaign).  But there’s nothing funny about losing a quarter of our endowment.  That type of loss could seriously affect the abilities of the College to carry out its mission, including doing stuff like apportioning out financial aid.  The economic disaster may seem far away for many Amherst students - it’s not like I have millions of dollars stowed away in a hedge fund - but the reality is that we all have a real stake in the College’s financial situation.

• As a result of the fiscal turmoil, the College will delay the $20 million renovation at the Lord Jeffery Inn until at least June 2009.  It seems to me that this is the right project to move to the back of the list - after all, its renovation doesn’t directly affect students.  What may not be apparent is that the inn will close anyway:

The inn will close because it has stopped taking reservations, and keeping it open “would result in a significant financial operating loss for the college,” said spokeswoman Caroline Jenkins Hanna.

This is kind of an issue.  (1) Employees at the Lord Jeff were already upset with AC for essentially booting them out of a job and alledgedly not helping them find new work and (2) the longer the Inn is closed, the worse it is for the town (taxes, employment, appearance, downtown business, convenience, etc.).  This guy even thinks that it’ll hurt the Town Select Board election chances of our friend Aaron Hayden.  And then there’s the fact that we’re cutting down nearly 200 trees by the Dickinson museum - never a good thing to do in environmentally-friendly Amherst.  Fortunately, President Marx is great with Amherst townfolk.  I’m confident that his leadership will keep the town-gown relations strong even in a trying economic situation.

Happy Halloween.

UPDATE: See?  The College is doing damage control already.  $40,000 sure beats the handful of Snickers and Butterfingers I got for Halloween.

So far, I’ve avoided any type of election analysis or opinion - that is not the place of this particular blog, after all - but I do feel compelled to make a note of one that could significantly impact the College.

Residents of the Town of Amherst may be aware of a competitive race for a seat on the Town Select Board.  Four contenders are vying for the spot - a brief description of each can be found at the Amherst Bulletin.

Two particularly noteworthy candidates for the election are Aaron Hayden and Dave Keenen.

Hayden is a capital projects manager and campus utilities engineer employed by Amherst College.  He is clearly serious about this election - his website is well-maintained and lists endorsements from Congressman John Olver as well as faculty members such as Catherine Sanderson and Jan Dizard.  His letter to the Bulletin is well-written and thoughtful.  Unsurprisingly, he’s also earned the endorsement of the Bulletin.

Keenan offers a far different vision of the future of the Town.  He’d like to see a “private-public partnership” with UMass and our College.  The Bulletin’s summary:

He suggests that rental properties should be taxed as businesses so that the impacts of college students living in these homes can be better mitigated. He also envisions replacing War Memorial Pool with a gathering place, paid for with money from the higher education institutions, for everyone in the community from children to senior citizens.

Most disturbingly, Keenan says he has a plan to:

Leverage Amherst College’s $4 million gift establishing the Center for Community Engagement for the benefit of Amherst residents, all the more important as the town faces cuts in community and social services.

I’m not exactly sure how Keenan would “leverage” our CCE for the benefit of Amherst residents, but it scares the heck out of me.

Without being as presumptuous to “endorse” a particular candidate, it seems to me that the choice in this election is fairly clear.  Most students at the College are not registered in the town of Amherst.  However, my message is to those that are as well as to the random faculty or staff employee that reads this blog.

There is a stark contrast between these candidates, both in terms of ability and in terms of vision.  Make sure to vote and make sure to do so with a clear understanding of the candidates and what they stand for.

In my last post, I linked to an Op-Ed by Amherst President Tony Marx in the LA Times.  In the piece, he argues against a proposed minimum spending rate on colleges’ endowment funds.  His points are especially compelling given the state of the market.  For the record, I stand in basic agreement with his reasoning.

However, an anonymous reader of this blog read the Op-Ed with far more attention to detail than I did.  This reader alerted me to a very significant quantitative error by President Marx.  Upon further review, I found not one - but two - quantitative mistakes that render one of Marx’s main arguments considerably less cogent.  I will attempt to describe the errors.  Thanks to the reader for the tip, the mathematical analysis, and even some of the original language.

The 6th Paragraph:

In addition, the financial benefit would be minimal. Colleges and universities spent, on average, 4.6% of their endowment funds in 2007, according to the National Assn. of College and University Business Officers. With $411.2 billion collectively in those funds, that works out to about $18.9 billion being spent on operating expenses, which includes student aid. Forcing the spending rate up to 5% would generate an additional $1.6 billion…

Our concern is with Marx’s conclusion that “forcing the spending rate up to 5% would generate an additional $1.6 billion.”  Here’s why:

——————————————————————-

Flawed Assumption #1

For simplicity, assume that the total endowment amount of $411.2B is constant across n schools, i.e., each school has an endowment of $411.2B/n .

So if every school spends 4.6%, then the amount to be gained by raising all schools to the 5% minimum would be:

n x (5% - 4.6%) x ($411.2B/n) = 0.4% x $411.2B = $1.6B .

Now suppose that one of the schools spends 4.7%. To keep the average at 4.6% there must be another school that spends 4.5%, but the amount to be gained by setting a 5% minimum would be the same:

[(5% - 4.7%) x $411.2B/n] + [(5% - 4.5%) x $411.2B/n] + [(n-2) x (5% - 4.6%) x ($411.2B/n)] = 0.4% x $411.2B = $1.6B .

Essentially each pair of schools would generate a total of 0.8% = 2 x 0.4% of incremental spending on their endowments.

This pattern continues on up to one school spending 5%. Then another must be spending 4.2%, and the amount to be gained still would be:

[(5% - 5%) x $411.2B/n] + [(5% - 4.2%) x $411.2B/n] + [(n-2) x (5% - 4.6%) x ($411.2B/n)] = 0.4% x $411.2B = $1.6B .

Each pair continues to generate 0.8% = 2 x 0.4% of incremental spending.

But if one of the schools spends 5.1%, then another must be spending 4.1%, and assuming that the first school continues to spend above the 5% minimum there would be no offset to the 0.9% of incremental spending required of the second school. The incremental spending thus would grow to:

[(5% - 4.1%) x $411.2B/n] + [(n-2) x (5% - 4.6%) x ($411.2B/n)] = (0.4% x $411.2B) + (0.1% x $411.2B/n) = $1.6B + (0.1% x $411.2B/n) .

This demonstrates that, to the extent schools are starting out above 5%, incremental spending would exceed $1.6B. Put another way, $1.6B is a lower bound on the incremental spending to be gained from the 5% threshold requirement.

For example, if half of current endowment value is held by schools that spend at a rate of 5.4% and half by those who spend at 3.8%, then the average is indeed 4.6%, but the incremental spend resulting from a 5% requirement would be:

($411.2B x 1/2) x (5% - 3.8%) = $2.5B .

So if there are any schools currently spending over 5% of their endowment - which there almost certainty are - Marx understates the impact of the spending requirement.  Any math major that comes up with a more elegant proof gets a free Barack Obama yard sign.

Flawed Assumption #2

President Marx is using data from NACUBO to suggest that colleges and universities spent, on average, 4.6% of their endowment funds in 2007.  This is correct.  However, that number is an unweighted average.  In other words, NACUBO surveyed every college for its numbers and then took a simple mean of the data.  They did not weight the percentage by endowment size - a critical distinction.

Furthermore, endowment spending percentage and endowment size are not independent.  It’s not hard to conjecture that schools with smaller endowments are likely to spend a greater percentage of their endowments, an assumption that is supported by NACUBO’s table.  And I don’t think that the table fully displays this because its highest bracket is simply limited to endowments greater than $1 Billion.

Let’s consider Princeton and Brown.  I would bet that Princeton (enrollment 7,500 / endowment 17B) spends a smaller percentage of its endowment annually than does Brown (enrollment 7,500 / endowment 3B).  With all of the fixed costs of educating students, how could it be otherwise?

If we accept that better endowed schools tend to spend at a lesser rate, we can reach the conclusion I’m trying to posit.  Under a spending requirement, the better endowed school will have to undergo a larger spending increase by percentage than will the lesser endowed school.  The percentage increase of the better endowed school will result in a significantly larger expenditure than the same percentage increase of the lesser endowed school.  .6% at Princeton is different than .6% at Brown.  And because Princeton is more likely to be further away from 5%, $1.6B is not an adequate figure to describe reality.

By failing to address this factor, Marx again likely understates the impact of a spending requirement.  Free Barack Obama rally sign for an elegant proof.

——————————————————————-

Before declaring that President Marx is irrefutably incorrect, I’ll give him a chance to squeeze out of this predicament.  My analysis is predicated on the assumption that schools spending over 5% will not change their behavior under a spending requirement.  It seems silly to think that they would.  Nevertheless, there is a theoretical possibility that establishing a legal minimum essentially would institutionalize a target that all players would gravitate toward, even those previously higher.  We could imagine a situation in which a  school - already above the goalposts - becomes aware that it is in fact not saving as much as it probably should and chooses to decrease spending to the 5% mark.

If this were the case, a calculation to predict the incremental spending from a 5%  requirement would likely overstate the impact of that spending requirement.  I remain skeptical, however.

In any case, it does not seem likely that the figure of $1.6 Billion accurately describes the sum of additional expenditures likely to be taken by colleges and universities under Senator Grassley’s proposal.  I would recommend that President Marx revisit his calculation.  Alternatively, if he wants to defend his analysis, we’d of course be thrilled to publish it here on AmhPub.