Sunday, January 20, 2008

Endowments: The Washington Post, American Enterprise Institute, and Beyond!

By Bryan O'Keefe

As everyone who follows higher education policy knows, the issue of college endowments has become a hot topic over the last few months. Our colleague Lynne Munson has written and testified about it, Congress has held hearings, and even the schools themselves -- Harvard and Yale -- have responded to criticism and decided to use some of their endowment funds to increase financial aid.

CCAP is now talking about this issue even more, starting with a big op-ed in the Outlook section of today's Washington Post. You can read Dr. Vedder's entire piece -- which addresses higher education financing problems more generally but also spends a big portion of his time on endowments -- by clicking right here.

We will be following up on this subject on Friday Feb. 1st with a conference at the American Enterprise Institute. Scheduled to appear at that event include some heavy-hitters on the endowment issue like Terry Hartle from ACE, Dean Zerbe from Sen. Grassley's office, Lynne Munson, Charles Miller, Donald Frey, Sandy Baum, and Dr. Vedder too. It should be an interesting event and we hope that many of our loyal readers can join us. You can register for that event here.

Finally, Dr. Vedder has a long policy paper about federal taxes and higher education that is due out around Feb. 1st too (copies will probably be available at that aforementioned conference). The paper will address a lot of issues, including endowments. If you would like a copy of that paper, please contact CCAP and we will have one in your hands when they are hot off the presses.

All in all, this is an important issue and we are happy to have the opportunity to present our views on it.

1 comment:

capeman said...

Interesting that Vedder is bragging about a conference at the American Enterprise Instiute to tout his stuff. But he wants recorded lectures for students at universities like Yale. Can't he even take his own medicine?