03-12-2019, 09:28 PM
(03-12-2019, 06:19 PM)cardcrimson Wrote: How much money does Stanford have in its endowment?
A fundamental question to me is why did the sailing coach risk so much personally to find ways to support his team? If I read the indictments properly, he didn't take a dime, the kickbacks all went to support Stanford Sailing.
Wrong, yes. Illegal, yes. Unethical, yes. With so much cash available to Stanford programs in general, I'm curious as to why he felt he needed to go to such extremes for the program.
Because most of the endowment is earmarked for VERY specific purposes by donors - I don't have exact #s but I do know that general operational support, much less sailing program support are pretty far down giving priorities for the majority of donors, including those with deep pockets. In addition, the amount of available general funds (i.e. unrestricted funding support, e.g. income from tuition revenues, indirect cost recoveries, unrestricted endowments and gifts, etc). have been increasingly squeezed in recent years, due to decreases in federal funding for sponsored research, competitive tuition pricing from peer institutions, increased operating costs for compliance programs and infrastructure, recruitment and retention programs for faculty, maintaining competitive benefits programs, etc. - it all adds up pretty quickly.