Top Colleges Sit on Their Money

A new report from the Education Trust concludes that our top colleges are being too stingy. Specifically, it examines private nonprofit institutions with endowments above $500 million and finds that many of them are underspending endowment assets, plowing their returns back into the money bin rather than using them to defray educational expenses for students. Of the 67 colleges authors Andrew Howard Nichols and José Luis Santos examine, roughly half have annual endowment spending of less than 5 percent, a generally-accepted target.