If there was ever a university that doesn’t need a preposterously large gift, it’s Harvard University. And yet, it was reported just the other day that billionaire hedge fund manager John A. Paulson has given $400 million to the engineering school, which will be rechristened the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Paulson’s gift is apparently larger than the gross domestic product of 15 of the world’s countries, including the Marshall Islands, Montserrat, and Tuvalu.
WTF!
At $32.7 billion and counting, Harvard already has the largest endowment of any university in the country. By a good measure. Poor Yale University trails at just $20.7 billion in second place. Harvard’s endowment is so large its reported to be bigger than the GDP of half the economies in the world.
Even among universities, the rich get richer, and everyone else just lags behind.