National - Thursday, November 19, 2009 10:14 - 2 Comments
NYU Endowment Weathering Storm
It has been a rough year and a half for anyone investing in the stock market. Although Wall Street is showing some signs of life (even as unemployment is looking is bleak as ever), the pain is only just starting to subside. College endowments across the country took a beating during the recession, forcing layoffs, hiring and pay freezes, and service cuts.
The downturn was certainly not kind to NYU. As we speak, the reengineering efforts are trimming budgets and staff across the University in order to offset some of the damage to the university’s finances.
Bloomberg reported earlier this month that in the Fiscal Year 2009 (ending June 30th) the NYU endowment shrank by 12% to $2.2 billion, down from $2.49 billion. You might be surprised to know that this is very encouraging news. Continue…
Featured, National - Wednesday, November 4, 2009 16:19 - 0 Comments
NYU Is Really, Really Liberal
In light of last night’s off-year elections, it seems an appropriate time to zoom back to the Halcyon days of the 2008 election cycle. Remember all that excitement during the campaign? All the hope? All the classic Sarah Palin videos? When John McCain said, “The fundamentals of the economy are sound?”
Ah, good times.
Anyway, I got to feeling curious about which of our fine professors and administrators decided to put their money where their mouth was and donated money to the Presidential candidates in the 2008 cycle. The results are pretty epic.
Using the Huffington Post’s FundRace tool, which aggregates the Federal Election Committee’s list of $200+ donations to single Presidential candidates, I searched for those people listing either “New York University” or “NYU” as their employer.
Of 312 donors (giving at least $200), 306 of them gave to Democratic candidates. That means that only 1.9% of the donors gave to Republicans. Donor list after the jump.
On Campus - Thursday, October 22, 2009 7:00 - 5 Comments
John Beckman’s Response To NYU Financial Aid Post
The following was submitted as a comment (and to me as an email) by NYU Spokesman John Beckman, in response to my piece yesterday, Is NYU Squeezing Everyone But Its Neediest Students? My comments are offset in quote form.
I appreciate that Charlie wanted to open a conversation on this topic; however, there are a number of factual errors – some serious, some disappointing — that really need to be corrected.
I’d like to start with the big picture, if I may. Between 2002-03 and 2009-10, cost of attendance rose 40.0%; institutional aid (gift, scholarship, and grant aid provided by NYU) increased by 94.8%. We gave Charlie information for two five-year periods – the one he was using (2002-03 to 2006-07) and the most recent (2005-06 to 2009-10) – and, in each, it showed that the percentage increase in institutional aid exceeded the percentage increase in tuition.
I would have thought this might have been highlighted as the key issue. Or the fact that NYU is providing some $160 million in institutional aid – far more than most other universities. Continue…
Featured, On Campus - Wednesday, October 21, 2009 12:30 - 21 Comments
Is NYU Squeezing Everyone But Its Neediest Students?
An extensive analysis of tuition data provides compelling evidence that NYU is giving more aid to its financially neediest students at the expense of its other students with significant need. Additionally, a comparison of NYU and uptown rival Columbia’s financial aid data shows in stark terms how little NYU has done (until very recently) to make attending college more affordable.
It is easy to bash on NYU for its stingy financial aid department. Everyone has heard about the University topping the list of schools with “Students Dissatisfied with Financial Aid.” You may also recall that, last semester, the school began calling students with a large gap between their need and their financial aid award to make sure they really, truly could afford to come to NYU.
But something has been missing in all the yelling about how expensive it is: actual evidence (particularly since administrators have some good arguments on their side).
NYU has a huge student population and therefore a small endowment per capita, which makes meeting full financial need impossible. University Spokesman John Beckman writes me, “NYU is not among the relatively small set of institutions that ‘meet full need’ – meaning that our financial aid resources are not sufficient to fill the ‘gap’ between the expected family contribution (as determined by FAFSA) and the cost of tuition. That’s largely a reflection of our per student endowment,” which was 148th 184th in the country in 2008.
Beckman also frequently points out that we have one of the highest percentages of Pell Grant-eligible students among major research universities. (Since Pell Grants are generally awarded to low-income, very needy families, the previous statistic is often used as a proxy for economic diversity on campus).
But that last point raises a big question: why does NYU attract so many needy, low-income students if its financial aid is so bad? Continue…
On Campus - Friday, October 2, 2009 13:30 - 9 Comments
How To Make NYUHome Less Frustrating
Despite the general lack of community-building college activities at NYU like big sports, being in everyone’s business, and going to the same frat house to party every weekend, we do have some things in common. We all love the Hayden lady. We all love cheap food ($1 slices, falafel, chicken over rice). And we all hate NYUHome.
Earlier this week, I got particularly fed up when Albert told me for the third time that my elapsed login time (11 minutes) exceeded the maximum allowed (10 minutes). So I sent a laundry list of complaints to ITS, filled with snark about how NYUHome mirrors NYU’s bureaucracy in a digital format.
To my surprise, I got a professional, useful response two days later. Here are some of the insights. Continue…
On Campus - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 11:13 - 2 Comments
NYU Game Theorist Stops By ‘The Daily Show’
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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NYU’s Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, one of the country’s most prominent political scientists, pimped his latest book, The Predictioneer’s Game, on the Daily Show Monday night. Bueno de Mesquita is known for his predictive models based on rational choice theory. He quantifies the influence and desires of every actor involved in making a decision or causing an outcome, plugs the numbers into his models, and predicts, usually quite precisely, what will happen in the future. He says that a CIA study affirmed that his model is correct over 90% of the time.
National - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 9:34 - 7 Comments
WSN Bungles the UCSC Occupation
The University of California – Santa Cruz student occupation has been another addition to the chaos of California’s budget crisis.
On Friday, my colleague Ned wrote a post about the UCSC occupation with the title, “UCSC Students Go All TBNYU On the Administration.” Yesterday, the Washington Square News ran a piece titled, “Occupation at UCSC similar to TBNYU’s,” along with a staff editorial agreeing with the UCSC students’ reasoning while condemning their methods.
Set aside the fact that WSN (as usual) failed to attribute credit to NYU Local for breaking the story while adding almost no value to it. The news piece isn’t the issue in today’s paper. The editorial, however, is a factually inaccurate, poorly thought-out mess that needs to be addressed. Continue…
On Campus - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 9:00 - 3 Comments
10 Quick Questions For NYU Economist Mark Gertler
If you’re not an economics major, you may not have heard of Professor Mark Gertler. In fact, it’s possible that some of the (undergrad) econ majors haven’t even heard of him. However, despite his low profile on campus, Gertler is one of the nation’s top economists.
According to a statistical analysis of thousands of economics papers, Gertler is the 14th most cited author in the world (a sign of his influence on the field), coming in just behind National Economic Council Director Larry Summers (#13) and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman (#12).
Gertler is a long-time publishing partner with now-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. According to Gertler’s CV, the two were co-authors on 9 papers. Much of their work focused on monetary policy – precisely what Bernanke is now determining.
Get Gertler’s take on the recession, his work with Bernanke, and whether or not any of us will be able to get a job after the jump. Continue…
On Campus - Friday, September 18, 2009 9:26 - 7 Comments
The Value Of An NYU Education
As the recession takes its toll on families’ finances around the country, the cost of higher education has become an increasingly hot topic this school year. Although the graph above only includes NYU (not including housing, food, or books!), you could create the same graph for most private universities and see a very similar trend – the cost of tuition exploding over the last sixty years and showing no signs of stopping.
But it has to stop at some point, right? Is the value of a college education really so great that students and families are willing to pay an increasingly larger fraction of their income for it?
I don’t think we are. And I think NYU will face some very difficult financial decisions in the near future if they don’t start working to adjust tuition prices to match the fundamentals. Continue…
National - Friday, September 11, 2009 8:15 - 2 Comments
The Three Health Care Bills
The fourth and final post in our week-long overview of health care reform.
Here’s a fun question: Have you read the bills? It is often asked by those who haven’t to politicians who also haven’t.
Kidding aside, the legislation winding through Congress right now is complicated and not easily boiled down into a single blog post. But it’s important to know what the general features of the bills are, which, perhaps surprisingly, vary little from one another.
Today, we will be talking about the three major proposals: the tri-committee House bill, the Senate HELP committee bill, and Max Baucus’ Finance committee outline. (Obama’s plan is close to the House bill, but also includes some tort reforms and flexibility on the public option).
Continue…
