The Financial Carnage on Campus - Sameer Pandya, Miller-McCune

The signs of the carnage on the American university campus are numerous, which leads to an important question. Are American colleges and universities the next institution in desperate need of a stimulus package? With the massive growth of the stock market in the last couple of decades, university endowments ballooned. Quietly, the managers of these endowments became the best-paid employees at many universities. But as it has been widely reported, many of these endowments have now plummeted in a matter of months. In 2008, the University of California endowment lost $1 billion; Harvard's endowment dropped by 22 percent, or $8 billion.