Background/Context: Endowments of institutions of higher education in the United States have attracted widespread attention in recent decades due to their meteoric rise in value and their precipitous decline during the recent recession. But there has been little research on the beginnings of the significant interest in and importance of…

In recent years, university endowments have received much attention for their spectacular returns and innovative investment strategies, but few papers have examined trends in the endowment sector at large. In this paper, we analyze a sample of 1,300 educational endowments between 1992 and 2005. A striking phenomenon emerges of the "rich getting…

The National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) Endowment Study found that colleges and universities registered a nominal total return of 2.9% for fiscal year 1994. This article examines the concentration of wealth, spending rates for endowment income, asset allocation, and nominal returns by various criteria. A table…

In this article we analyze the dynamics of endowment spending and real endowment values using rules that tie endowment spending to inflation. Numerical examples demonstrate that under a pure inflation rule, spending rates tend to drift away over time from the appropriate rate, leading to either rising or falling real endowment values. Under a…

This paper traces events in the life of George Peabody. Born in Danvers, Massachusetts near Boston, Peabody attended a district school for four years and was apprenticed in a general store at an early age. After four years of apprenticeship, Peabody worked with his brother in a drapery shop, then traveled to the District of Columbia with his uncle…

This study examined the growing inequality in wealth among the Ivy League institutions. In July 1990, the endowments at the 8 Ivy League institutions varied from about $441 million at Brown to $4.683 billion at Harvard. A decade later, the range was $1.44 billion to $19.2 billion. The Ivy institutions' endowments grew by an average of 261% during…

This paper chronicles the life of George Peabody, intermingled with anecdotes on how the researchers gathered data in their studies. A brief overview of Peabody's life introduces the paper with a personal narrative of how the authors' search for details on his life began. Both researchers had affiliations with educational institutions resulting…

This paper focuses on three academic labor market issues that researchers at Cornell University are addressing currently: (1) the declining salaries of faculty employed at public colleges and universities relative to the salaries of their counterparts at private higher education institutions; (2) the growing dispersion of average faculty salaries…

The role of endowments in academic finances of higher education is examined. Two effects of the decline of endowment funding, their failure to keep pace with inflation and loss of income for innovative programs, are cited. The historical role of endowments in institutional finances is reviewed. Present concepts of endowment management are…

Two reports on institutional fund raising ("The Quest for Major Gifts: A Survey of 68 Institutions," 1983, by Addison L. Winship II, and "Seeking Major Gifts: How 57 Institutions Do It," 1991, by Anne W. Altizer) offer examples of how a healthy college endowment provides stability through difficult economic times. (MSE)

Community colleges are making more aggressive and sophisticated efforts to raise funds from private sources because of federal, state, and local funding cutbacks, and some institutions are having substantial success. (MSE)

This report examines trends in voluntary support for higher education between 1980 and 1994 based on analysis of the Council for Aid to Education's annual survey on voluntary support of education. It reviews how philanthropic support for higher education compared with support for other charities and how this level of support changed over time. It…

The literature on financial issues in higher education is limited. Six major themes in the literature in l996 include the reduced federal role and increased state role in funding; managing costs, including deferred maintenance and capital spending in times of shrinking resources; concern about rising tuition and its impact on access; concern about…

This paper describes the lives and contributions of George Peabody and his nephew Othniel Charles Marsh. Marsh influenced his uncle's gifts to science and science education, particularly in the founding of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard, the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, and the Peabody Academy of Science,…

Reviews the literature concerning development in academic libraries and suggests ways for libraries to make money. Topics addressed include fund raising; marketing; development personnel; the development process; internal revenue generation; fee-based services; corporate support; grants; endowments; gift books; friends of the library groups; and…