Felix Salmon

It’s tragic that Cooper Union has decided to start charging tuition. The fateful announcement was made by Mark Epstein, the self-aggrandizing chairman of the board of trustees, and was greeted with dismay by thousands of Cooper students, faculty, alumni, and friends.

It’s the trustees who are in charge of the school, and the trustees who most need to be held accountable for what happened. To date, Jamshed Bharucha, the president of Cooper Union, has shouldered most of the blame — and he does deserve a good chunk of it. The decision would not have been taken without his pushing for it, and while he has the full support of the board, which is paying him $650,000 per year, he has signally failed to garner the support of the broader Cooper community. (It will take the tuition payments from 67 average students just to cover Bharucha’s salary; to put that in context, a full freshman class comprises about 20-35 architecture students, 65 in art, and 115 in engineering.)

That said, Bharucha’s situation is a bit like that of Greece’s George Papandreou: he’s a leader who inherited a crisis which was much deeper and more serious than he had any reason to believe. Cooper’s parlous state was bequeathed to him by the previous president, George Campbell, but also by the a board of trustees which signed off on a series of dreadful decisions, most catastrophically the decision to borrow $175 million to build a shiny new building, while having no ability whatsoever to pay that money back.

In order to recover from such atrocious decision-making, the first thing you have to do is to draw a clear line under the past, being very explicit about what went wrong and where. If you can’t admit your own past mistakes, then you’ll be doomed to continue to make those mistakes in the future.

Which is where Mark Epstein comes in. Epstein, unlike Bharucha, was intimately involved in most of Cooper Union’s worst decisions. He should therefore be disqualified from making even more bad decisions, at least unless and until he can demonstrate that he understands what the board did wrong and how they managed to bring Cooper Union to its fiscal knees. This is one reason the tuition announcement was received so badly: the Cooper community quite understandably has no reason to trust that Epstein’s board will do the right thing. Quite the opposite.

There has been no hint of any apology or remorse from Epstein when it comes to the board’s past mistakes; indeed, he hasn’t even come out and admitted that the board made any mistakes at all. When I appeared on Democracy Now with him Thursday morning, he aggressively defended everything the board did in the past, including the decision to build the ridiculously expensive New Academic Building.

Epstein set the tone for the conversation from the very start:

Let me first categorically state that had we had enough money and were able to generate enough revenue to cover our expenses and keep the school with 100 percent scholarship policy, that was our intention. But we can’t. We don’t have the ability to raise enough revenue.

A big part of that problem—and I’ve made this public before—is that we don’t have enough alumni support. Traditionally, only 20 percent of our alumni, who have gotten 100 percent scholarships, give back to the school on a regular basis. You know, contrast that with Princeton. Princeton charges now $40,000-some-odd a year for scholarships, and they’re one of the best schools at alumni participation. They get a participation rate of approximately 65 percent.

I’ve pretty much responded to the first part of this already, so suffice to say: if you’re running a free school, you don’t start with your expenses and then try to work out how you’re going to “raise enough revenue”. Instead, you start with your revenues, and then work out how many students you can educate with that sum of money.

As for the idea that the alumni are to blame, and that Cooper should be more like Princeton — well, that is so misguided, on so many levels, that no one capable of making that statement should ever be the person who makes the decision to start charging tuition. Princeton is very good at being Princeton, but Peter Cooper was never trying to create a center of research excellence, where Nobel laureates regularly rub shoulders and where undergraduates can study any subject under the sun.

Cooper prides itself on being one of the most selective colleges in America, and picking students solely on merit. Princeton is also highly selective, but can’t claim that its admissions process is entirely merit-based: some 40% of legacies applying to Princeton end up being admitted, compared to just 9% of non-legacies. Alumni donate to Princeton in large part because they rationally believe that doing so will help their kids get in there; Cooper’s alumni, in contrast, would be horrified were Cooper to start admitting applicants on the basis of who their parents are. Besides, most kids don’t even want to attend Cooper, given that the only choices it offers are art, architecture, and engineering.

Epstein basically wants Cooper’s students to pay for their education after they’ve graduated — but if you wanted to create the kind of school where students effectively paid their tuition ex post rather than ex ante, you wouldn’t create Cooper Union. Art students don’t tend to go on to particularly lucrative careers, and neither do architects, who generally have an astonishingly low incomes given the amount of skill and education required to do their jobs. Even the engineering school only rarely generates highly-paid graduates, and then often only when they leave engineering to pursue a career on Wall Street.

Within days of Epstein’s announcement that Cooper would be forced to charge tuition for the lack of alumni donations, Ronald Perelman announced that he was giving $100 million — to Columbia Business School, a place which really doesn’t need the money. Perelman will get his name on a building, of course: The Ronald O. Perelman Center for Business Innovation will sit across from the Henry R. Kravis Building, which was itself the result of another $100 million donation. But that kind of thing has never been what Cooper Union is about, and it’s profoundly depressing that Epstein seemingly aspires to it.

On Democracy Now, Epstein talked about how Cooper had “raised $60 million in specific naming opportunities for the new building as part of the capital campaign”; as far as I know he has never admitted that the campaign was anything other than a glowing success story: “a triumph of grit, determination and the gradual evolvement of dedicated volunteer leaders: the board, alumni and friends”.

In 2007, Cooper Union’s five-year strategic plan talked about alumni giving as a key area of success, and added:

Current financial projections indicate that in fiscal year 2008, the college is likely to achieve positive cash flow for the first time in about a quarter century, and longer term projections indicate that the overall annual cash deficit problem will then be left behind for the foreseeable future.

As late as June 2009 — with the worst of the financial crisis behind it — Cooper’s board was still getting the message out that the college had “sidestepped the crisis” and was “basking” in good fortune. No hint there of desperate financial straits, or any need for massive and urgent alumni donations, without which the board might be forced to break the century-old tradition of free tuition.

So you’ll excuse me if I raise an eyebrow when Epstein points the finger at tight-fisted alumni, rather than accepting any blame at the board level. Cooper has never had much in the way of alumni donations, and in fact alumni donations have been much higher in the past 15 years or so than they ever were before. So where did this sudden desperate need for extra alumni donations come from — and who on the board decided that it made sense to embark on a plan which required unprecedented levels of alumni giving? Cooper’s alumni have a lot of love for the institution. But there aren’t very many of them — it’s a small school — and they don’t tend to become massively wealthy.

According to Epstein’s version of events, Cooper is a victim of circumstances largely outside its control: “the costs of education have gone up,” and Cooper Union’s revenues haven’t managed to keep pace. And it’s certainly true that Cooper’s costs have gone up. Never mind the enormous presidential salaries, just look at the interest payments on the loan which Cooper took out to construct its New Academic Building.

Stay with me here: according to Epstein, the poorest 25% to 30% of students will still get a full scholarship, and the richest 25% to 30% of students will be expected to pay the maximum amount of $19,250; the rest will be assessed on a sliding scale between the two endpoints. To a first approximation, then, we can anticipate that total tuition payments will average out to roughly $9,625 per student. The interest payments on the $175 million loan from MetLife come to $10.3 million per year, which means that Cooper will need the income from roughly 1,070 students just to pay the interest on the loan. (Never mind the extra $5.5 million per year in principal repayments which start in 2019.) Coincidentally, 1,070 is pretty much the size of Cooper’s entire student body.

The conclusion is hard to resist: Cooper Union’s tuition payments are required to pay off the interest on its $175 million loan, and if it hadn’t taken out the loan, then charging tuition might not have been necessary.

So, is that $10.3 million per year — all of which goes directly into the maw of a giant insurance company — a legitimate “cost of education” at Cooper Union? Yes, in that Cooper can’t educate its students unless it makes those payments. But we’re not talking, here, about some generalized and inchoate force which is driving tuition payments up across the board; we’re talking about a very specific decision, made by Cooper’s trustees, which had dreadful consequences.

Of course, Epstein doesn’t see it that way. Here’s what he said on Thursday:

The building helped us financially; it did not hurt us. We had two buildings that were in need of tens of millions of dollars in upgrading to make them building and fire code compliant, to make them ADA compliant. The accrediting boards that determine whether or not we can offer degrees questioned the validity and the viability of our facilities, because they were falling behind par.

The new building was paid for by selling the ground lease under our old engineering building, which we got $97 million for, right before the crash. And we raised $60 million in specific naming opportunities for the new building as part of the capital campaign. The new building going up on our old engineering building site, being built by Minskoff, will generate $2 million a year at least, ongoing, to the school. The building was paid for by those funds, not the loan.

The loan proceeds were eaten up by the deficit.

Let’s be very clear about what Epstein is saying, here. Cooper borrowed $175 million, in the form of a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. It then built a new building at a cost of slightly less than $175 million. But don’t for a minute conclude that the loan was used to pay for the building! Not at all! The loan was simply “eaten up by the deficit”.

Here’s my challenge to Epstein, and to Cooper Union: find me one person — just one — who (a) believes this version of events, and (b) isn’t a member of Cooper’s Board of Trustees, either now or when the decisions were made. In fact, I would be astonished if even a majority of the current board would agree that the new building was helpful rather than harmful, financially. You just need to look at it to see how much of a white elephant it is; you don’t need to know that the engineering faculty — which mainly uses the new building — voted against it twice, and that the myth about the new building being required in order for Cooper to keep its accreditation is, well, let’s just say that none of the faculty believes it.

The reality is that you don’t need to know anything about the building at all in order to understand that you can’t take Epstein at face value here. All you need to know you can be found in one sentence from the official Cooper Union FAQ:

The MetLife pre-payment penalty for the 30-year loan is approximately $81 million (as of August 2012).

You read that right: even if some gazillionaire (or capital campaign) dropped $175 million into Cooper’s lap tomorrow, they still couldn’t pay off their $175 million loan: it also has a whopping $81 million prepayment penalty.

The trustees’ story is basically that they expected to be able to pay for the new building through their capital campaign: one of them told James Stewart that the college expected to raise $125 million more than it actually did. And Epstein told me, when I asked what the $175 million was for, that “part of it was used as a bridge loan, while the building was being built, because the moneys from the capital campaign takes years to come in”.

But here’s the question: if the MetLife loan was meant to just be a bridge to future alumni donations, then why was it structured as a 30-year fixed-rate loan with a prepayment penalty of as much as $81 million? The capital campaign ended in 2012, not in 2036.

All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that Cooper’s trustees, who couldn’t be trusted a year ago, still can’t be trusted today — and that so long as Mark Epstein is chairman of the board, the broader Cooper community simply will not rally behind him and give his decision to charge tuition any kind of broad-based legitimacy.

On Friday, Kevin Slavin — one of the most outspoken opponents of charging tuition at Cooper — was elected to the position of alumni trustee for the period from December 2013 to September 2017. Slavin didn’t even run: he was a write-in, a protest at the way in which Cooper’s trustees seem to be unaccountable to anybody. The vote wasn’t for Slavin, so much as it was against Bharucha, and Epstein, and everybody else on the board who has consistently downplayed their own culpability in the Cooper fiasco.

Charging tuition doesn’t solve Cooper’s financial problems — far from it. In order for Cooper to get onto a sustainable footing, it’s going to need to regain the admiration of multiple constituencies, including current students, alumni, current faculty, and prospective students. It’s pretty clear that the board isn’t going to get that support by blustering and stonewalling and pretending that they didn’t do anything wrong. So maybe, if and when Bharucha manages to find a new communications chief, that person could start by persuading the board to give a full explanation of — and take full responsibility for — everything which went wrong.

James Stewart has an important column on Cooper Union today: if you read it carefully, it hints at how much further Cooper might yet fall from its founding mission of providing free education. Cooper’s trustees are press-shy these days, but Stewart snagged an on-the-record interview with one of the most important ones: John Michaelson, the chair of the investment committee.

Stewart chides Michaelson for his reliance on hedge funds, which have not served the Cooper endowment well. In the 2012 fiscal year, for instance, Cooper’s returns on its managed endowment were negative: they were down 5%, in a period where a standard mix of 60% stocks and 40% bonds would have returned a positive 8%. And with more than $100 million in hedge fund investments in 2008, Cooper was paying more than $2 million a year in hedge fund management fees alone, never mind performance fees. That’s the kind of money the college desperately needs for operational expenses.

Still, overall, Stewart is far too gentle on Michaelson, who was pictured grinning next to former president George Campbell in a highly-mendacious 2009 WSJ article extolling the performance of the Cooper endowment. Here’s how Stewart characterizes the endowment’s performance:

Compared with many universities, Cooper Union did a good job managing its endowment through the recent financial crisis. As recently as 2009, the school maintains, it ranked first among all American universities for endowment performance.

In reality, as Stewart never really explains, that “endowment performance” was entirely fictional — it was magicked out of thin air when Michaelson revalued the land under the Chrysler building upwards in order to mask a torrid performance from the rest of the endowment.

On top of that, Cooper levered up its endowment at exactly the wrong time, borrowing $34 million at an interest rate of 5.875% and investing it in the endowment, where it promptly evaporated during the financial crisis. Michaelson tries to explain this away by saying that the borrowed money was kept in cash, while it was the rest of the endowment which lost money. But if you look at the endowment that way, then, as Stewart points out, hedge funds accounted for more than 60% of the funds Michaelson was managing. That’s an insane ratio, especially given that Michaelson was quoted in the WSJ as being “especially critical” of the Yale Model of investing in illiquid alternative asset classes.

Stewart also goes easy on the trustees — Michaelson foremost among them — for making their single biggest mistake: borrowing $166 million to build the grandiose New Academic Building. “Hardly anyone disputes Cooper Union’s need for new engineering facilities,” he writes — and he’s hilariously, egregiously wrong about that. Virtually everyone outside the Board of Trustees disputed Cooper’s need for new engineering facilities — even a large chunk of the engineering faculty, which had the most to gain from the new building. The “need”, it’s now abundantly clear, was not a real need at all; instead, it was a device, an excuse to make the decision to construct the new building seem reasonable, even necessary.

Stewart essentially says that Cooper did need to build something new, it just didn’t need to build something quite as grand and expensive as it ended up with. But he’s deeply and importantly wrong about that. Here’s the thing about mortgages: they’re not just free money, they’re something you need to pay off, over time. And in order to do that, you need income. When Cooper Union’s trustees, including Michaelson, took out a $175 million 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 5.875%, they knew exactly how much money Cooper would need to repay that mortgage every year.

And they had no idea where that money was going to come from.

This — much more than any endowment mismanagement — was the colossal, fatal error made by Cooper’s trustees. There are generally two ways of paying down a mortgage: either you go to work and earn money you then use to pay the mortgage, or else you rent out the building itself and use the income it generates to cover the mortgage payments. Neither route was available to Cooper: all of its income, and then some, was needed to run the school, which meant that there was nothing left over to pay the mortgage. And with the exception of a tiny coffee shop on the ground floor, Cooper isn’t renting out any of the new building.

At the end of Stewart’s piece, Michaelson makes a very important admission:

Mr. Michaelson conceded that the school could have continued to invade the endowment to cover deficits and would have survived until 2018, when the higher payments from the Chrysler lease kick in. “But what kind of school would you have had by then?”

The answer, of course, is a free one; if this really was an option, then the trustees owe the Cooper community a serious, detailed explanation of how and why they ended up making the decision to charge.

But the real answer is that while the higher payments from the Chrysler lease would be enough to cover the operating costs of a small, excellent college, they would not be enough to cover Cooper’s operating costs and the mortgage payments on the new building. Michaelson is making it sound, here, as though he decided to charge tuition for the sake of the school. In fact, he decided to charge tuition because that’s the only way that the school can pay off the monster loan he took out with no conception of how he could ever pay it off.

What’s Michaelson’s explanation of where he thought the money for the mortgage payments was going to come from? He doesn’t seem to have one, but the closest thing that Stewart finds is a deluded “if you build it, they will come” mindset:

Trustees told me that the college’s development consultants told them that a signature building with a marquee architect — in this case, Thom Mayne of Morphosis Architects — would attract a large donor eager to have his or her name on a trophy building.

But no such donor materialized, and experts I consulted said Cooper Union had it backward — the first step is to attract the donor, who then is involved in choosing the architect and designing the building. “I’ve never heard of a case where you build the building first and hope a donor comes along,” said Kenneth E. Redd, director of research and policy analysis for the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

Passing the buck like this to anonymous “development consultants” is just despicable. It was the board which borrowed $175 million without being able to pay it back, not the development consultants. And what’s more, it was the board which locked in a fixed 5.875% interest rate for the next 30 years, which isn’t the kind of thing you do if you’re basically just borrowing money on a short-term basis before a deep-pocketed donor comes along to pay off the mortgage in full.

And in any case, according to what we now know, once the building had been constructed and no beneficient billionaire had materialized to pay for it, Cooper was financially doomed: it had no ability to pay off the monster mortgage. If that was the case, then why on earth was Michaelson telling the WSJ — after the New Academic Building was finished — that Cooper’s financial condition was positively rosy?

All of this, however, is stuff we already knew, pretty much. The scariest part of Stewart’s article comes with another quote from Michaelson, where he grumbles about the fact that most of Cooper’s income comes from the Chrysler Building. (The land under the Chrysler Building was bequeathed to the college by Peter Cooper.)

Stewart quotes Michaelson as saying that having 84% of the endowment in a single asset “is against everything I stand for”. He then does a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations designed to show that maybe Cooper should sell the land under the Chrysler Building, and intimates that the main reason Cooper hasn’t done so is the board’s “nostalgic attachment” to the asset.

On its face, this is completely crazy. The land under the Chrysler Building is worth substantially more to Cooper Union than it is to anybody else, because under a deal that Cooper Union struck with New York City, the college receives more than $18 million per year in something called payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs. That’s the amount of money that the building would normally generate in property-tax payments for the city; instead, those payments end up going straight to Cooper Union, and New York City gets no property tax revenues at all from the iconic skyscraper.

If Cooper sold the land under the Chrysler Building, all those property tax payments would revert to New York City, rather than the new owner, and a substantial revenue stream would be effectively destroyed, rather than sold. I don’t know what the net present value is of the Chrysler Building’s PILOTs, but it’s got to be somewhere in the region of half a billion dollars, if not more. It makes no sense whatsoever to give that up for nothing.

So why is Stewart taking this cockamamie talk seriously, and why is Michaelson talking with a straight face about selling the land under the Chrysler Building? The answer, I fear, is that Cooper Union, in deciding to charge tuition, has given New York City more than enough ammunition to tear up the deal whereby Cooper gets the Chrysler Building’s PILOTs.

Cooper Union says that the current occupation of the president’s office “has created a poisonous and dangerous atmosphere that can potentially destroy the school forever”. No one in the administration is going to come out and say explicitly what that means, so let me translate it into English for you: they’re saying that the more noise Cooper’s students make in protest at the tuition decision, the more likely it is that New York City is going to decide that it wants its property-tax revenues back, and that Cooper Union, without free tuition, is not a worthy enough cause to justify an effective $18 million per year public subsidy.

If Cooper loses its PILOT payments, then that really would be financially devastating for the college, and it would at that point be effectively forced to liquidate the Chrysler asset, whether it wanted to or not. It seems to me that Michaelson is using Stewart to help lay the groundwork for such an eventuality, and is trying to make the case that selling the Chrysler Building land is not such a dreadful thing to do after all.

I don’t buy it. But looking at what Michaelson says in Stewart’s piece, I can’t help but wonder whether maybe there is a solution here after all. The problem, remember, is that Cooper can’t sell the Chrysler Building land because if it were to do so, the new buyer wouldn’t receive those massive PILOT payments. But what if the purchaser of the land were another important civic institution? Could Cooper Union, working with the Bloomberg administration, work out a deal whereby the Chrysler Building land — with its PILOTs intact — could get sold to Trinity Church, or one of New York’s big non-profit hospitals, or even possibly the Bloomberg Foundation? New York has no shortage of massively-endowed foundations and non-profit organizations which have the wherewithal to buy such an asset; many of them might be interested in it.

It’s not clear why New York City would have any particular desire to go along with such a deal, unless they could by doing so claim to have managed to preserve Cooper Union as a tuition-free college embodying Peter Cooper’s founding principles. In other words, Cooper’s board of trustees would have to go back on their decision to start charging tuition. But the proceeds from selling the Chrysler Building land would be more than enough to pay off the mortgage on the New Academic Building; and at that point, the trustees would just have to work out how many students they could afford to teach on the income from the money left over. Cooper Union would continue to exist, it would continue to be free, and Mike Bloomberg would end up capping his tenure as mayor by saving a noble institution from the brink of disaster. I think Jamshed Bharucha should put in a call, even if he has to do so from his home phone.

This time last year, I wrote about the pressure that public companies face to grow at all costs, and how destructive that pressure can be. Growth is, weirdly, inimical to longevity: if you want something to last for a very, very long time, then what you really want to create is something large — but not huge — and which doesn’t need to grow at all. The world’s oldest companies are nearly all family-owned affairs; they’re big enough to keep those families well-off, and they tend to produce goods or services for which there is a steady demand across the centuries. (Hotels, for instance, or wine.)

Peter Cooper understood this well. A wealthy man, he owned a lot of land in Manhattan — including the land underneath what is now the Chrysler Building — and he knew that land would, literally, produce healthy rents in perpetuity. A philanthropist, Cooper knew exactly what he wanted those rents to be spent on: he created the Cooper Union, a college with the defining characteristic that it would charge its students nothing. It was — and is — a noble cause. And in the early days, its trustees quite literally bought into that cause: they helped out with its endowment, and covered its deficits in years where it lost money.

Cooper understood that free education doesn’t really scale. If you’re charging, then extra students provide extra income which can pay for extra teachers and administrators and buildings. But if you’re giving education away for free, then it’s imperative that you operate strictly within your means. The only way to grow is if you persuade some new generations of wealthy benefactors to contribute their own money or land. But at Cooper Union, that hasn’t happened for many decades.

As a result, Cooper Union has always been an extremely special educational institution, the kind of place where a little went a very long way. The faculty was not well paid; the facilities were bare-bones. But the students were fantastic, because Cooper could pick the very best of the very best. And the college’s overriding social mission engendered a huge amount of loyalty and love for the institution, as well as being reflected deep in its curricula. Here’s Sangamithra Iyer, for instance:

When I graduated from Cooper, in 1999, I received a scholarship for a master’s program in geotechnical engineering at UC Berkeley. That summer, a major earthquake devastated Turkey. The first day of classes, the first thing one professor said was that Turkey smelled “like 40,000 dead people” and that “engineers who know that smell do their work a lot differently than those who don’t.” It was this sense of social responsibility that led me to pursue engineering, but also to leave it from time to time. A Cooper education freed me from debt, and allowed me the freedom to pursue purpose, not profit-driven endeavors. Its Union, for me, not only united the arts and the sciences but also was about making connections between the technical, the political, and the social.

While the Cooper Union ethos never left the students or the faculty, however, it did seem to desert a significant chunk of the Board of Trustees and the administration. Starting as long ago as the early 1970s, the board started selling off the land bequeathed by Cooper, not to invest the proceeds in higher-yielding assets, but rather just to cover accumulated deficits. Cooper hated debt and deficits, but that hatred was not shared by later administrators, who would allow debts to accumulate — bad enough — until the only solution was to sell off the college’s patrimony, thereby reducing the resources available for future generations of students. If you visit Astor Place today, the intersection once dominated by the handsome Cooper Union building, the main thing you notice are two gleaming new glass-curtain-walled luxury buildings, one residential and one commercial, both constructed on land bought from Cooper Union.

Then, when you turn the corner and look at what hulks across the street from the main Cooper Union building, you can see where a huge amount of the money went: into a gratuitously glamorous and expensive New Academic Building, built at vast expense, with the aid of a $175 million mortgage which Cooper Union has no ability to repay.

The bland name for the building is a symptom of the fact that Cooper’s capital campaign, designed to raise the money for its construction, was a massive flop: no one gave remotely enough money to justify putting their name on the building. It’s also a symptom of the fact that no one on the board had any appetite for naming it after George Campbell, the main architect of the scheme which involved going massively into debt in order to construct this white elephant.

Campbell, pictured grinning widely in a now-notorious 2009 WSJ article, claimed that Cooper was a financial success story when in fact it was on the verge of collapse. He’s the single biggest individual villain in the Cooper story, and it’s a vicious irony that Cooper’s latest Form 990 shows him being paid $1,307,483 in 2011 — after he left Cooper’s presidency. (Cooper Union explains that the amount represents six years of “deferred compensation/retention payments”, but the timing couldn’t be worse.)

Campbell’s enablers and cheering squad were a small group of trustees, many of them Cooper-trained engineers gone Wall Street, who had so internalized the ethos of the financial world that it never occurred to them that they shouldn’t be constantly trying to get bigger and better and shinier. Campbell was paid $668,473 in his last year at Cooper — he was one of the highest-paid college presidents in the country, despite running a naturally small institution with serious space and money constraints. Board-member financiers enabled his dreams of growth and glory, hoping that some of the glamor from the newly-revitalized institution would reflect back on themselves. Naturally, when the whole project turned out to be a disaster, they scurried ignobly off the board as fast as they could.

The turnover on the board continues: the latest Form 990 alone shows six trustees — Marc Appleton, Robert Aquilina, Judith Rodin, Moshe Safdie, William Sandholm, and Philip Trahanas — resigning their posts over the course of the year. And if you look at the current list of trustees, you’ll see there have been other resignations since then: Douglas Hamilton, Vikas Kapoor, Audrey Flack, Stanley Lapidus, Giorgiana Slade, Cynthia Weiler, and Ronald Weiner. That’s 13 resignations in the course of just over two years; the entire board has only 22 members.

For an institution which was founded to exist in perpetuity, this kind of board turnover is decidedly worrying, especially since it was the board which decided and announced that Cooper Union will start charging tuition. If this board is just passing through, with precious little aggregate tenure or institutional memory, the legitimacy of that decision is surely greatly reduced.

What’s more, a weak board puts extra power in strong presidents — and both the current president, Jamshed Bharucha, and his predecessor, George Campbell, seem to have been able to persuade the board to implement anything they wanted to do. Bharucha is no fan of Campbell, for obvious reasons, but in many ways the two well-paid presidents are quite similar. I recently obtained a highly-unofficial transcript of the September 2012 board meeting*, where Bharucha was far from despondent or apologetic about the fact that Cooper’s board felt as though it was being forced to choose between charging tuition and closing down entirely. “Turning adversity into opportunity is really an opportunity that very few institutions have,” he said, before talking about something called “a vision process”. Later, he comes out with this:

I resonate very much to future-oriented thinking about higher education. I assure you that I will be guiding the institution to embrace these technologies and we’re not going to be trapped in the past. I think if we get over this hump there will be so much opportunity… I think we can lead… We don’t have a global brand. We’ve got to build that global brand.

Similarly, the trustees’ statement includes worrisome language like this:

Maintaining the highest standards of excellence means that we must constantly aim to improve through investment. We must engage in a continuous process of strengthening our academic programs, our faculty, and the clarity of our academic reputation. The institution will invest in our programs and our faculty to ensure that we always are, and are regarded as, equal to the best.

This is emphatically not Peter Cooper’s vision. The United States is full of higher-education institutions trying to carve out “a global brand” for themselves, often through “investment”. They generally have multi-billion-dollar endowments, global name recognition, and undergraduate tuition costs somewhere north of $40,000 a year. You could name a dozen of them off the top of your head, and Cooper Union would never be one of them. On the other hand, what you can’t do is name a dozen — or even two — institutions like Cooper, based on a social mission and free tuition and low-key excellence, where the pedagogy is not reliant on the provision of climbing walls, and where the health of the institution is not reliant on jet-setting deans who address the World Economic Forum on the subject of Global Leadership.

An investment is what you do when you spend money today, with an eye to reaping a profit in the future. Investments, by definition, are associated with future cashflow: if they’re not, then they’re not investments. Once Cooper Union starts “investing” in programs and faculty, it will have to charge for those programs and faculty in order for the investments to bear fruit. All of which is to say that this tuition charge is permanent: once it’s implemented, the chances of it being reversed are de minimis.

Bharucha, like Campbell before him, is intensely focused on improving Cooper Union’s name recognition. Cooper Union has historically not been very well known, even among New Yorkers: they often think it’s some kind of labor union, rather than an undergraduate college. That’s fine: the people who matter — the teenagers applying to the art school, the entire architectural profession — know exactly what Cooper Union is, and what it stands for. Not every non-profit organization needs its own awareness campaign — but of course if Cooper Union now has to start attracting richer kids capable of paying $20,000 a year in tuition, it’s going to have to start marketing itself more aggressively. Again, that’s not something it historically ever wanted or needed to do, and it’s not something Peter Cooper would be remotely happy about. His resources were meant to go towards education, not towards marketing and billing and “development”.

Another thing that Bharucha and Campbell had in common: both entered into talks about essentially selling Cooper Union to a deeper-pocketed institution. Campbell talked to NYU in the mid-2000s; Bharacha talked to Bard more recently. Obviously, none of those talks got very far; the NYU discussions ended when it decided to buy Polytechnic University instead, in 2008. In either case it’s hard to see how Cooper Union’s social mission and commitment to tuition-free education could have been preserved in perpetuity.

But the end result — what we ended up with — is arguably worse. Once you start charging tuition, you can’t go back: you build a huge amount of infrastructure for students who feel entitled to certain amenities, given how much they’re paying. And the college becomes a business with a P&L, having to chase revenues and persuade potential students that it’s a better financial deal than the various alternatives they have.

The result is that Cooper is certain to lose its much-cherished selectivity: according to the transcript, the September board meeting discussed a report from Maguire Associates which concluded, intuitively enough, that there’s simply no way to charge $20,000 a year and still accept less than 8% of applicants. That selectivity helps Cooper Union rank top among “regional colleges” in the influential US News ranking; both the selectivity and the ranking are sure to fall once tuition is introduced. (Cooper Union claims that it will have “need-blind” admissions, and that if you’re eligible for any kind of Pell Grant, you will get a full scholarship. But there’s no getting around the fact that it will need a certain number of paying students in order to make the math add up.)

Bharucha has also managed to ensure the undying opposition of Cooper Union’s most passionate students. Just this weekend, they painted the lobby of the architecture school black in protest, unaware that during the September board meeting, Bharucha complained about their “politics of destruction”. The relationship between Cooper Union’s administrators and its students has never been worse — and that’s not going to make it easy for Cooper to be able to paint itself as a prestigious institution worth paying $20,000 a year to attend.

In September, according to the transcript, Bharucha talked of the “enormous reputational risks” of charging tuition, and the “difficulty recruiting new students”. So it’s not like any of this was unexpected. “If it weren’t for all this noise”, Bharucha said in the meeting, he would be much more confident that charging tuition could work. But with it, he said, “it will be very difficult” to make a success of the new strategy.

The board has gone along with Bharucha’s strategy anyway, in the belief that all the alternatives are worse. In large part they were forced into their decision by the mortgage on the New Academic Building: you can’t shrink your way to sustainability when you owe MetLife $175 million, and you have to come up with the eight-figure debt-service payments somehow. Given that no one was about to write a $100 million check to Cooper Union, the only other place to find the necessary money was by charging. Even if doing so means destroying the very basis upon which Cooper Union was founded.

*A word about this transcript. Cooper Union spokesman Lloyd Kaplan told me that board meetings are not officially recorded or transcribed in any way, which is consistent with what my sources are telling me — which is that the meeting was recorded without the knowledge or consent of the board members.

The transcript is an important document, and I’m sure it will make its way onto the internet sooner or later. I’m not going to be the one to do that, however, because I have no evidence which can vouch for its authenticity, or demonstrate that the people named in the transcript actually said what it says they said. Conversations with two different sources have convinced me that the transcript is accurate; even then, however, I have only directly quoted Jamshed Bharucha, the president, rather than any unpaid board members.

Kaplan has told me that Cooper will have no comment on whether Bharucha actually said the things I’ve quoted him saying: he won’t confirm that he said them, but neither will he deny that he said them. My sources and I are sure that the quotes are accurate, but you should be aware that it’s never going to be possible to be 100% certain on that question.

If you want to really understand the importance of Cooper Union and its century-long tradition of free tuition, I can’t recommend Sangamithra Iyer’s excellent article in n+1 highly enough. And it contrasts greatly, of course, with the official statement from Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees, saying that the college is going to stop being free very soon: beginning, in fact with the students entering in September 2014. The statement is curiously upbeat, for a decision which essentially marks the death of Cooper Union as we know it. And it’s chock-full of the kind of doublespeak which is all too easily deciphered:

After eighteen months of intense analysis and vigorous debate about the future of Cooper Union, the time has come for us to set our institution on a path that will enable it to survive and thrive well into the future…

Under the new policy, The Cooper Union will continue to adhere to the vision of Peter Cooper, who founded the institution specifically to provide a quality education to those who might otherwise not be able to afford it…

Maintaining the highest standards of excellence means that we must constantly aim to improve through investment…

Although we appreciate that these decisions are difficult for everyone to accept, we look forward to working together with all of you to building a future that will ensure the preservation of Cooper Union as a great educational institution that remains true to Peter Cooper’s founding principles.

The fact is, as Iyer clearly lays out, that charging tuition runs in direct violation of Peter Cooper’s vision and his founding principles. Indeed, the original Cooper Union charter held the institution’s trustees personally responsible for any deficit, while ensuring that education was free to all enrolled students.

Over the past 40 years or so, however, Cooper Union has been living beyond its means, financing structural deficits by periodically selling off various bits of land that it owned inside and outside New York City. That’s clearly an unsustainable strategy, and it finally came to an end when Cooper Union sold off the last sellable plot it had — the old engineering building at 51 Astor Place, which is now becoming a big ugly office block. The proceeds from that sale failed to remotely cover the costs of building the fancy New Academic Building at 41 Cooper Square — a building which the NYT’s architecture critic, Nicolai Ourourssoff, declared upon its opening to be an icon of the “self-indulgent” “Age of Excess”.

But here’s the most astonishing thing, at least to me: no one seems to care how this happened, no one has been held responsible, no one has been blamed. The current trustees talk vaguely about how they “share your sense of the loss” of free tuition, but they don’t apologize for their decision, and not one of them, as far as I can tell, has resigned in protest or shame.

Make no mistake: Cooper Union suffered a massive failure of governorship, and its trustees have abandoned the principle which underpinned the entire institution. A trustee is someone who governs for the benefit of others — and Cooper Unions trustees have failed, spectacularly, in their first and highest role, which was to preserve Peter Cooper’s tuition-free institution.

And after failing so miserably at their own jobs, the trustees then had the nerve to announce, right in the middle of dropping their bombshell, that they expected the current students of Cooper Union to give more to the institution! Never mind that Cooper Union will never be the same again, and that the whole reason why it is so beloved has now been jettisoned. Start donating today, and maybe future students might be able to save a few hundred bucks on their future tuition bills. Or maybe the president will just get a raise to $1 million a year. Who knows: the trustees seem to be capable of anything.

There’s a lot of recrimination going around right now, and the entire Cooper Union community is in desperate need of some catharsis; the trustees, collectively, and over time, managed to break the very thing that they were entrusted to preserve. Cooper Union’s students, and alumni, and faculty, and supporters all deserve a full accounting of exactly how that happened, and who was primarily to blame. It’s in the nature of institutions like boards of trustees that they are very good at protecting the guilty, but in this case the trustees have to come clean. No one will ever trust Cooper Union, or its trustees, or its president, unless and until such an accounting is made public. And, justice demands it.

Andrew Martin has a very long, and not particularly illuminating, article about college indebtedness in today’s NYT. The title of the piece is “Colleges’ Debt Falls on Students After Construction Binges”, and it’s almost 3,000 words long, but somehow Martin fails to even hazard a guess as to the degree to which colleges’ debt is falling on students after construction binges. We’re certainly told that it’s happening:

A decade-long spending binge to build academic buildings, dormitories and recreational facilities — some of them inordinately lavish to attract students — has left colleges and universities saddled with large amounts of debt. Oftentimes, students are stuck picking up the bill…

Higher debt payments and other expenses have contributed to the runaway inflation of college costs, and the impact on students is real and often substantial.

How big are these bills? How substantial is the impact on students? Martin doesn’t hazard a guess: instead, he just says that “the costs are not easy to isolate”. But there are a few hard numbers, far down in the piece:

Outstanding debt at the 224 public universities rated by Moody’s grew to $122 billion in 2011, from $53 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2000. At the 281 private universities rated by Moody’s, debt increased to $83 billion, from $40 billion, in that period. Rather than deplete their endowments, some colleges borrowed to help pay bills after the financial crisis, but most borrowing was for capital projects.

Since 2000, the amount paid in interest and principal has increased 67 percent at public institutions, to $9.3 billion in 2011, and it increased 62 percent at private ones, to $5 billion last year.

Martin doesn’t tell us what this works out at on a per-student basis, so let’s try. According to the Census Bureau (see Table 5), there are 20.4 million students enrolled in US colleges, split between 16.6 million undergrads and 3.8 million graduate students. According to Martin, using numbers from Moody’s, the amount of college-level debt being borne (in part) by those students has gone up by $112 billion, and the annual debt service has gone up by $5.6 billion. (These are numbers Martin could have just printed directly, but for whatever reason he chose not to; instead, you need to back them out of the numbers he cites.)

Students don’t bear all those extra costs: as Martin notes, “in some states, including New York, California and Connecticut, borrowing for public colleges and universities is mostly paid for by taxpayers, so students are not directly responsible for payments on the debt”. But for the sake of argument — and despite the fact that the University of California is the single biggest debtor, with SUNY at number 2 — let’s assume that all the extra costs are borne by students. In that case, we have 20.4 million students paying an extra $5.6 billion per year in interest, which comes to an annual cost of $274 per student.

Remember that $274 is a deliberate over-estimate, since a lot of the extra borrowing that Martin is writing about will get paid out of state budgets rather than out of students’ tuition fees. What’s more, the rise in interest payments coincides with a lot of universities shifting floating-rate debt to fixed-rate debt, which increases the interest payments but makes it them much less prone to rising unexpectedly.

Obviously, the increased costs will be higher at the universities with the most construction activity, and lower at more frugal colleges: the $274 is just an average. And I’m no fan of what Martin calls the Edifice Complex: I’ve been highly critical of capital projects at Harvard and NYU. But if it wants to make the case that students are paying “often substantial” sums as a result, the NYT is going to have to do better than this.

Indeed, if you want to criticize big capital projects, then “students end up paying a large part of the interest expense” is way down the list of good ways to do so. Interest expenses are generally small as a percentage of capital costs, because interest rates are low; what’s more, when you divide them between tens of thousands of students, the per-student cost becomes entirely manageable. The problem is more in the way that these projects force universities to lose a lot of flexibility in terms of their optimal size: it’s much easier to grow than to shrink, even as it’s hard to maintain quality when you’re growing too fast. The result, all too often, is shiny facilities, and a lower-quality education.

There’s a bigger lesson here, too, for the NYT. Martin says that the data underpinning this article was compiled for the NYT by Moody’s, which means that the NYT has access to a full and rich database. So why doesn’t it publish that data? Good data-driven journalism both publishes as much data as possible, and uses the data to drive conclusions, rather than simply dropping numbers into a foreordained article.

What should have happened here was for Martin to take a deep dive into Moody’s data, to try to work out which colleges saw the largest debt-service increase and whether there was any correlation between debt-service increases and tuition increases. Even if he didn’t have the appetite to do that work himself, at least if he published the data then the rest of us could do it. Instead, we just get an article which is very long on anecdote and very short on useful data. It’s a shame.

When we last checked in on Cooper Union, it was an opaque morass of murky finances in desperate need of some sunlight. President Jamshed Bharucha has made all the right noises: he told Brian Boucher, for instance, that “if you have a financial problem, you need to put that out there, along with all the possible options”. But the fact is that since he arrived in July 2011, he has released little more in the way of financial information than any of his predecessors*, while making it clear to his favored media outlet (the Wall Street Journal) that the conclusion of the current process is foreordained: Cooper Union is going to start charging tuition, after more than a century of being free.

But Bharucha has lost control of the narrative: a group calling itself Students for a Free Cooper Union has occupied the top floor of the iconic Foundation Building, and is getting a lot of mostly very positive press. It’s worth noting that the protesting students are guaranteed free tuition until they graduate: they’re not protesting out of narrow self-interest. But they do understand that free tuition is at the very core of what it means to be Cooper Union, and that Cooper without free tuition simply wouldn’t be Cooper any more.

But don’t take the protestors’ word for it. Look at the official Revenue Task Force report, from October. It’s worth quoting at length, since the occupiers themselves couldn’t put it any better:

The learning environment created by The Cooper Union’s policy of full-tuition undergraduate scholarships is inimitable, attracting a student body with a high degree of engagement and intensity. Many Cooper students who were admitted on scholarship to other top-tier schools have chosen Cooper for its ethos of scholarships for all.

Rather than competing with one another, Cooper students are known for teaching each other, fostering a culture of collaboration in which the students see themselves as colleagues with the faculty, rather than as consumers purchasing education as a commodity.

Full-tuition scholarships are a 110-year tradition at Cooper Union, and also serve as a counter- point to the crisis in American higher education, one in which crippling costs, divestment in public funds, and ever-decreasing avenues of access are becoming the new normal.

By operating outside higher education’s conventional consumer model, Cooper Union’s meritocracy has engendered far-reaching creative, cultural, economic and political implications and consequences. The college’s twinned commitment to access and excellence is not only the key to the Cooper student’s accomplishments inside its classrooms, laboratories, and studios; it is also a model for the field of higher education as a whole.

The problem is that even after saying all this, the Revenue Task Force was in an impossible situation: while coming to the conclusion that free undergraduate tuition is untouchable, they were also told that the revenues they were tasked with finding could not come from other obvious places, like the Board, alumni, or the sale of assets.

And so the report comes to the conclusion that undergraduate enrollment should shrink by “up to 30%”, in order to make space for a set of new graduate programs, some of which would charge more than $30,000 per year.

Now Cooper Union has never really been a home to graduate programs: there are a handful of grad students now, but Cooper Union has always been much more about teaching than about research, and no one has really thought through how Cooper might move to a system where a large part of the budget would come from grad students, even as the undergrads continued to be the heart and mission of the school. It’s not at all clear that potential grad students would even want to shell out $30,000 a year — plus downtown New York living expenses — to attend a boutique college housed in all of two buildings. And given that Cooper students study art, architecture, and engineering, where on earth did the idea come from that the college should offer a two-year pre-med course?

The whole concept reeks of mission creep, at a school which already relies far too much on its students, rather than its teachers, when it comes to maintaining quality. Cooper has a lot of adjuncts and a very small tenured faculty, and if you ask anybody associated with the school how it keeps its quality high, they’ll tell you that it’s a function of the enormous pool of applicants. The idea is that Cooper is extremely good at identifying America’s most talented teenagers, and can basically get its pick of the crop thanks to its free-tuition policy.

It doesn’t really matter whether that’s empirically true or not; what’s certain is that Cooper’s exceptionalism is an article of faith among both students and faculty, and that it is deeply rooted in the school being free. How and whether that could translate to a for-profit grad-school program is far from clear — and given the success of the board in implementing previous grand projects, it’s hard to have much faith in its success. After all, if the quality of Cooper comes in large part from its ability to pick and choose its students, then there’s really no reason to believe that a non-free graduate program would have particularly high quality at all. Charging for some students would violate Cooper’s stated mission, which says that it “awards full scholarships to all enrolled students”. Worse, it would set a very dangerous precedent: in the likely event that the grad-school program was a flop, it would at that point be much easier to extend the tuition fees to undergrads.

Indeed, that is already being talked about. A document leaked on Monday, written by a mysterious “Undergraduate Tuition Committee” somewhere within the engineering school, lays out all the reasons why Cooper should start charging tuition to everyone, including the inevitable “under-performance of other revenue sources”. Here’s a taster:

A low undergraduate tuition (eg, initially ~$9600/yr) holds the prospect of a minimal and reversible impact on the academic quality of future classes and on the institution’s reputation… in the event that more risk-laden revenue generation efforts underperform, progressive increments in undergraduate tuition might be applied…

Charging undergraduate tuition is the most likely method to succeed in meeting the School of Engineering’s five year target. Some alternative approaches, such as creating new graduate programs (for which tuition will be charged) are, in the short term, too uncertain to rely on.

The document is both marked up and scanned, and includes this astonishing passage:

Or, in English, “never mind if bright minority candidates can’t afford to study at Cooper Union any more, there are much better good financial packages for them at lots of other colleges”.

The document was greeted by the occupiers for precisely what it is: a clear indication that undergraduate tuition is on the table at Cooper Union. As such it only adds urgency to the first of their three demands, that “the administration must publicly affirm the college’s commitment to free education”.

It also shows the importance of their second demand, that “the Board of Trustees must immediately implement structural changes with the goal of creating open flows of information and democratic decision-making structures”. Important discussions about the future of Cooper Union should happen in public, in full view of all stakeholders, especially students and faculty. Such discussions will be noisy and protracted, and probably unpleasant for trustees — especially the ones who signed off on a massive mortgage for the new engineering building, without any idea how they were going to pay it. But the trustees need to bear in mind exactly who they’re representing, and put up with a certain amount of unwelcome publicity. As the current occupation shows, they’ll get it anyway.

There’s no good reason why the very existence of the “Undergraduate Tuition Committee” was a secret** until its report was leaked on Monday, and Cooper Union, in its official communications, still hasn’t said anything about it. Instead, Assistant Director of Public Affairs Jolene Travis put out a statement dismissing the occupiers as “eleven art students” who “do not reflect the views” of the broader student population, adding for good measure that “full tuition scholarships at The Cooper Union are currently valued at $38,550″. (The reaction to this statement, which was handed out to select journalists, can be found here.)

The third and final demand of Students for a Free Cooper Union is the resignation of Jamshed Bharucha, which seems like a good idea to me. He is running a financially-struggling school, which desperately needs all the money it can get. But no one is going to donate money to a shambles which looks like this. The university frequently asserts that the protests are coming from a small minority, while a silent majority actually supports the administration. But I see no evidence for this view at all*: it looks more as though the senior folks at Cooper are simply deluding themselves.

A year and a half into Bharucha’s tenure, there’s very little reason to believe that he’s the right man for the job — while the current occupation, which was vocally supported at a press conference Tuesday afternoon, seems to provide a pretty strong prima facie case that his university has no faith in him. Bharucha should at the very least make it clear to whom he considers himself answerable, and under which circumstances he would resign. But it seems to me at least that Cooper needs a leader: someone who can communicate effectively, be honest about the many enormous mistakes that were made in the past, and lay out a plan to keep this storied institution on a sustainable footing for centuries to come.

That plan should probably include most of the ideas in The Way Forward, a paper compiled by the Friends of Cooper Union which suggests a number of ways that the college can fix some of its fiscal issues. Even together, they probably don’t add up to enough to pay the mortgage on the new engineering building. But they’re a well-intentioned start, which the university could rally behind while it works on outstanding financial issues. Who knows: faced with a broad new sense of purpose and a new president, donors might even be willing to open their checkbooks again.

*Update: Bharucha has actually been more transparent on the financial side than I gave him credit for; specifically, I missed the Audited Financial Statement Summary, which gives a pretty good indication, if you’re good at reading financial statements, of how Cooper Union wound up in its present predicament. And as for Bharucha’s support within the student body, it turns out that it does exist, among the engineering students. They’re just very quiet about showing it: you won’t find much in the way of public statements of support on the internet, for instance. Most of the opposition to Bharucha is being organized by art students, which maybe makes sense, given the level of income the average art student can expect upon graduation.

**Update 2: Maybe not entirely a secret. Go to the Minutes page of the Engineering Students Council. Then click on “Open Student Body Meeting with Dean Wolf – (2012-10-16)”. Under a heading named “August”, the existence of the Undergraduate Tuition Committee is referred to.

Update 3: I have now received a long response to this post from Cooper Union: you can read the whole thing here. This is what it says about the Undergraduate Tuition Committee:

The acting dean of the Albert Nerken School of Engineering has organized committees to identify possible revenue streams through the creation of new programs. An analysis, which included 500 variables, was conducted to see at what level of revenue would be needed in order to maintain the full tuition scholarship for undergraduates. This is an ongoing process and no decision has been made.

Also, a group calling itself the Engineering Student Council has released a statement in support of Bharucha.

Would you like to take a free online university course which teaches you the basics of quantitative analysis and also helps you manage your money so that you get high returns with low risk? Of course you would. Let me introduce you to Computational Investing, Part I, taught by Tucker Balch, Ph.D., on the Coursera website.

Under “Recommended Background” we’re told that “the primary prerequisite is an excitement about the stock market”. And there are two recommendations under “Suggested Readings”, including All About Hedge Funds : The Easy Way to Get Started, by Robert Jaeger. (Apparently it “explains how any investor can take advantage of the high-potential returns of hedge funds while incorporating safeguards to limit their volatility and risk”.)

This is a genuine university course: it’s the same one that Balch teaches at Georgia Tech. And so you’d expect a few disclaimers, at least, along the lines of “this is an introductory course, it’ll help you understand a few concepts, and maybe be the first step on the road to becoming a quantitative analyst yourself one day, but please, kids, don’t try this at home”.

You might expect such a thing, but you’d be disappointed. Instead, you get the exact opposite. Check out Week 4 (you might have to register; it’s easy and free) and then “Lecture Video 1.2: Response to Questions from Students”. According to Balch, the “number one most popular question” he gets asked is “Do I use these techniques to manage my own funds?”. He responds as forthrightly as he can:

The answer is yes.

Balch continues:

I have a number of different investments that I use these approaches for. With regard to my company, Lucena Research, we manage a few small funds as a way to test our techniques and validate them. One of them in particular I’ll show you in just a moment.

It’s far from clear how a student who has merely taken an online course might ever hope to replicate the returns that Balch manages to generate at Lucena (“Hedge Fund Technology for the Strategic Investor”). But in any case Balch does share with us a Lucena portfolio which “was developed specifically to be low risk”. It looks like this:

I look at this and I immediately get suspicious: there’s something quite Madoff-like about the way in which Balch’s returns go steadily up and to the right regardless of what the stock market is doing. Here’s how Balch explains what’s going on in there:

This approach was developed specifically to be low risk. It includes a basket of less than 20 equities that are traded about every 2 weeks. It’s 2X leveraged, meaning that half of the money is borrowed investment.

So this approach is a 2X levered fund with less than 20 stocks? Sounds very risky to me. But Balch shows us the numbers to prove that it isn’t:

The first thing to note here is that although Balch told us he was going to show us one of the “small funds” that he uses “to test our techniques and validate them”, this does not look like a real-money fund. There’s no indication, for starters, of what the borrowing costs are: if the fund is indeed 2X leveraged, how much does it cost to borrow $10 million on an ongoing basis?

Maybe those numbers are somehow incorporated into the returns — but then there’s the very odd section on “Transaction Costs”. The commissions bit makes sense: if you trade 10 times a week on average for 20 months, then that’s about 860 trades in all, and the commissions add up to about $20 per trade.

But then there’s the “slippage”, which doesn’t make sense. Commissions are real costs: they’re the amount of money you have to pay your broker to execute your trades. Slippage, on the other hand, is not a real cost, but rather a theoretical cost: it’s the difference between the official market price of a security, and the price you actually end up paying. It’s a way of taking a theoretical portfolio, which always trades at the market price, and adjusting the returns to make them more realistic. If you have a real portfolio, as Balch suggests that he does, then there’s no “slippage”: the slippage is built in to your actual returns.

So it seems that Balch, after promising to show us the returns that one of his “small funds” has generated, ends up doing no such thing. (And also, I don’t think that a $20 million fund would count as “small” for a college professor who tells us that most of his money is in his TIAA-CREF retirement account.) Still, he says:

This is a conservative approach which nets about 15%-20% per year. You can absolutely follow more risky approaches that’ll provide higher returns. This is the kind of approach I follow.

In other words, if you take what Balch is saying at face value, he’s managed to come up with a conservative investment strategy, which is levered 2-to-1, which generates returns of more than 15% per year, which he follows himself. And he encourages his students to try to do the exact same thing.

There are lots of courses on Coursera, and most of them aren’t as sketchy as this. But I do think that what we’re seeing here is the beginning of a serious problem with online universities like Coursera: you can never be sure about their quality control. And in general, if you’re taking a college course where the professor encourages you to lever up a small number of stock-market investments in the hope of getting low-volatility 20% returns, I’d advise thinking twice about that professor, and that course. Because it just doesn’t pass the smell test.

On Thursday, I looked at the way in which cultural institutions tend to spend a huge amount of money on architecture, even if they would be better off spending that money more directly on their missions. In response, I got a fascinating email from a professor at NYU, asking me about its plan to spend some $6 billion on a hugely ambitious construction project — one which is fiercely opposed by local residents and NYU faculty.

The opposition is predictable, of course: Greenwich Village is as Nimbyish as communities get, and the professors who are railing against the plan are precisely the people who are going to suffer the most from endless construction work and ultimately the disappearance of the views and light many of them currently enjoy. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong to oppose the plan. As we saw at Cooper Union, ambitious construction projects can be hugely damaging to colleges — especially ones which don’t have a large endowment to fall back on.

At Harvard, the empire-building of Larry Summers resulted in a disaster — but at least the endowment is huge enough that if Harvard loses $1.8 billion, it’s not the end of the world. At NYU, by contrast, the size of the endowment is significantly smaller than the budget for the university’s expansion. And as a result, the whole project is significantly riskier. If NYU ends up having to dip into its endowment to fund losses on this project, then that could be hugely damaging for an institution which is already under-endowed by the standards of most top-tier US colleges.

The situation at NYU Is, I think, the flipside of the saga we just saw at the University of Virginia. There, a popular president found herself at odds with trustees who had been successful in the private sector; at NYU, the faculty is similarly opposed to the plans of the trustees, but in this case the president is very much aligned with what the trustees want.

In both cases, it seems, the faculty seems pretty happy with the state and status of the university as it stands, and are looking for low-risk stewardship. The trustees, by contrast, are much more aggressive, and are looking for growth and full-bore engagement in the higher-education arms race known as Bowen’s Rule. Here’s how Howard Bowen put his five-point rule in 1980:

1. The dominant goals of institutions are educational excellence, prestige, and influence.
2. In quest of excellence, prestige, and influence, there is virtually no limit to the amount of money an institution could spend for seemingly fruitful educational needs.
3. Each institution raises all the money it can.
4. Each institution spends all it raises.
5. The cumulative effect of the preceding four laws is toward ever increasing expenditure.

On top of that, there are many New York-specific idiosyncrasies involved in the NYU plan. NYU is nestled in the heart of downtown New York, on some of the most valuable land in the world. That makes expansion insanely expensive, of course — but it also raises opportunities for a higher-education form of regulatory arbitrage.

New York has strict and recondite zoning laws, which are largely responsible for the value of any given plot of land. Take a site in Greenwich Village: if all you’re allowed to build there is a few townhouses, it’s going to be worth a fraction of its value if you’re allowed to erect a 40-story hotel. Every so often, zoning is changed, normally in the direction of allowing more development. When that happens, the people lucky enough to own the land in question make windfall profits.

This dynamic helps explain the way in which property developers are deeply enmeshed in city politics — and it also, I think, helps explain a lot of NYU’s behavior. NYU, quite aside from being an educational non-profit, is also the largest property developer in downtown New York. And with this plan, it’s trying to change the zoning for a lot of the Washington Square area in a way that will, if all goes according to plan, essentially drop a huge pile of money in the university’s lap. Hence the proposals for things like hotels and retail: they’re not allowed right now, and if they do become allowed, NYU fully intends to build such things and make substantial profits from them.

This isn’t a stupid plan. It makes sense, if you don’t have a $30 billion endowment throwing off huge amounts of cash every year, then you look for income in other places.

On the other hand, when a university turns property developer that’s decided mission creep — and it’s mission creep accompanied by billions of dollars in debt. Property magnates generally do really well for themselves — until they don’t. And here’s where you can see the cleavage between NYU’s trustees and its faculty. The trustees tend to be successful businesspeople — people who have had the requisite combination of risk appetite and luck that’s necessary to make lots of money. And rich people have another characteristic, too: they nearly always overestimate the amount of skill and underestimate the amount of luck which went into their success. Plus, they think that success is somehow infectious: if they’ve made their millions through levering up, then that’s probably a good strategy for the non-profits whose board they’re on, too.

On top of that, the president-and-trustee class of people has a natural tendency to want to build monuments to themselves, as well as a certain emotional detachment when it comes to empathy with other people. They’ve seen the plans: the architects have shown them glossy pictures of what Greenwich Village is going to look like in 2031, but they don’t really feel the amount of noise and pain involved in getting there from here. They don’t live in Washington Square Village.

And most importantly, they don’t need to rack up enormous student loans just to attend NYU in the first place. Here’s the chart, from the NYT’s excellent infographic on university tuition and student debt:

You can see from this chart that while there are lots of colleges which charge NYU-level tuition fees, NYU is among the very worst of them in terms of the amount of debt its students are burdened with upon graduation. That’s partly because it has a relatively small endowment, and therefore can’t offer the level of financial aid that, say, Princeton can; it’s also, of course, a function of the fact that New York is an incredibly expensive place for a student to live. But either way, if NYU cared about its students as much as it cares about its reputation, it would be searching hard for ways to decrease the debt they’re graduating with.

Instead, NYU is embarking on a building plan which will almost certainly, in one way or another, feed through into higher tuition fees and higher levels of student debt at graduation. After all, tuition fees are a hugely important source of income for NYU, and NYU is going to need all the income it can lay its hands on if it’s going to be able to pay off the loans it takes out to construct all these new buildings.

I’m no preservationist stick-in-the-mud: I think that cities need to evolve over time, and that if Greenwich Village had a bit more density, New York would cope just fine. I also carry no torch for things like “the acclaimed Sasaki Garden”, which turns out to be a bunch of concrete planters which are all but inaccessible to real New Yorkers. If NYU wants to replace that garden with something better, I’m all ears.

But I do think it’s worth asking some pointed questions about who exactly all this construction is supposed to benefit. It’s certainly not the current students, who will be long gone by the time it even gets started. It’s not the current faculty, whose lives will be disrupted and who are almost unanimously opposed. And there’s a strong case that it’s not future students, either, who will see even higher tuition fees and I’m sure won’t welcome the extra student loans they’re going to have to take out.

Universities will always have plans to expand — and indeed NYU already has campuses in no fewer than four different countries. Before embracing this particular plan, then, it might be worth looking at the history of previous university expansion projects, and asking whether they actually delivered on the promises they made at this point in the process. Because the costs of this particular project seem a lot more obvious than the benefits do.

Remember the murky finances of Cooper Union, which went from healthy to disastrous in no time at all? There’s a lot of controversy about what went wrong, where exactly the problems lie, and what’s the best way to fix them. But one thing’s abundantly clear: the management and trustees of Cooper Union have been unhelpfully opaque about the college’s finances for years, and the college’s students and alumni are fed up with the “trust us, we’ve worked it out this time” approach.

The first thing that’s needed, before any big decisions about things like tuition fees, is transparency about Cooper Union’s finances, and generally much more openness and clarity from management. After all, this is the place where contractor Jonathan Rose got a $2 million contract to oversee the new flagship academic building, while before* his mother Sandra Priest Rose sat on Cooper’s board of trustees — all without any kind of disclosure as to how he was selected. Was Sandra Priest Rose’s pledge of $5 million towards the building contingent on her son getting that contract? No one knows.

But transparency, it turns out, is exactly the opposite of what we’ve ended up getting. Yesterday, Cooper Union’s president, Jamshed Barucha, posted a “framework for action” on the college’s website. In it, we’re told that something called the Revenue Task Force has released an “interim report” which has “recommended” that Cooper “explore” charging fees for “academic programs that build on our unique strengths”, which “may include master’s and other professional programs”.

All of which sounds rather tentative, but in principle the timing here is propitious. Tomorrow sees the Second Community Summit at Cooper Union where the Task Force’s report could be discussed and debated.

Except, discussion and debate isn’t really what Cooper is looking for here. Barucha has not released the Task Force report, and shows no sign of doing so. And for all the qualifiers in his note, it’s quite clear that the decision has already been made. “Cooper Union to Charge“, says the WSJ; “Cooper Union Will Charge Tuition for Graduate Students“, says the NYT.

The WSJ is a good guide to the official Cooper Union line:

The school’s economic troubles date to the early 1990s, when rent it received from the land it owns under the Chrysler Building decreased from $13 million to $11 million while school expenses increased.

It’s far from clear that this is even true: Barry Drogin, for one, who has looked into this issue very deeply, says quite unambiguously that “the Chrysler Building rent and payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT) have risen steadily every year, with large increases scheduled every ten years starting in 2018.” In any case, the Chrysler-building-rent problem is long solved. Revenue from the building will be $32.5 million in 2018, $41 million in 2028, and $55 million in 2031. Cooper’s fiscal problems have nothing to do with insufficient income from the Chrysler Building, and the fact that Cooper still seems wedded to that storyline is worrying.

And then there’s this:

Mr. Bharucha said he has received backing for the plan in recent discussions with faculty and alumni nationwide. “There is very strong, if silent, majority who are highly supportive of a plan that energizes the institution,” he said.

I love the idea of a “very strong” majority which is “highly supportive” of this plan — and yet, for all their incredible support, are somehow completely silent. Bharucha might as well have said that pigs fly when you’re not watching them: his statement might be unfalsifiable, but at the same time it’s also completely implausible. Cooper’s stakeholders are incredibly mistrustful of Bharucha and the trustees, and it’s hard to see how even a silent majority could be supporting a plan which exists only in the vaguest possible form.

After all, we’ve been here before. In 2006, Cooper Union filed something called a cy pres petition, in a successful attempt to get New York to allow it to borrow money against the Chrysler Building. That petition only came to light years later: the whole process, at the time, was shrouded in secrecy. And you can see why that might be: even as Cooper was loudly proclaiming its health in public, the petition was saying that “The Cooper Union currently faces the possibility that it will become unable to carry out its statutory mission in the not-too-distant future”; that it “currently faces a grave fiscal crisis”; and that even faced a real risk of losing its academic accreditation.

As part of that petition, Cooper committed to implementing something called a Master Plan, which involved cutting spending, raising $250 million, increasing the amount that alumni donate to the school, and other things, none of which really happened. As the board of trustees reported in 2011, “three key components of the Master Plan were not achieved as anticipated” — all of which were vastly more germane to the current fiscal crisis than any change in Chrysler Building rents in the early 1990s.

In other words, there’s really no reason why anybody should trust Bharucha or the trustees — to have any faith that they’re being fully truthful with the rest of the school, or that they’re in any position to successfully execute on their promises.

And what of the huge new $160 million (ish) academic building? The trustees still say that it has nothing to do with the fiscal crisis, despite the fact that it’s responsible for some $10 million a year in interest payments:

It is also important to state that 41 Cooper Square was not the cause of the current financial dilemma. Its construction relieved Cooper Union of the costs that would have had to be incurred to renovate the old engineering building and the Hewitt Building to make them acceptable sites for a 21st century education and meet accreditation standards.

This just doesn’t pass the smell test. There’s some small possibility that it’s true, but unless and until the trustees show how they arrived at this conclusion, I have no reason to believe them. The engineering faculty actually voted against the construction of the new academic building, saying that they were more than capable of staying where they were at significantly lower cost. (This fact was, of course, not included in the cy pres petition.)

More to the point, there’s never been a coherent account of how exactly Cooper Union ever intended to pay off the massive $175 million loan it took out to construct the new building. It needed its income from the Chrysler Building to pay its annual costs; and of course it doesn’t have any tuition revenue, since it doesn’t charge tuition.

This is the main thing that has never been adequately explained — by constructing the new building, Cooper Union added on a permanent $10 million annual expense, without any stated means of being able to cover that expense. The new academic building is a sunk cost at this point, of course. But until the trustees explain their logic surrounding its construction, it’s going to be extremely difficult to trust them to do the right thing going forwards.

*Update: Finally, some clarity on the Jonathan Rose/Sandra Priest Rose question. Tellingly, it comes from Roxanne Donovan, a representative of Jonathan Rose Companies, rather than from Cooper Union. She says that Jonathan Rose was hired more than a year before his mother was invited to join Cooper’s board; she also says that there was a formal RFP process for the selection of Jonathan Rose Companies.

Why Cooper Union wasn’t able to be transparent about this itself simply baffles me, and really makes my point. Just because you’re being secretive doesn’t mean you have something to hide.

David Segal is the best writer on the NYT’s business desk, so it’s a good thing that he was chosen to pen today’s 5,000-word disquisition on the economics of law degrees. He’s taken a particularly dry subject and turned it into a compelling and accessible read; that’s no mean feat.

At the heart of the article is law schools’ bait-and-switch operation: universities rake in millions of dollars in tuition fees from students who are given to understand that a well-paid job lies waiting for them upon graduation. But such jobs are hard to find and precious few law graduates will ever waltz straight into a $160,000-a-year Biglaw job, especially if they graduate from a non-top-tier school.

The connection between well-paid jobs and top-tier universities is well known and as a result, there’s something of a statistical arms race going on between universities, all of which want to improve their rankings. Segal doesn’t quite accuse the colleges of outright lies, but he comes very close: at one point, for instance, he talks about the “several different explanations” which Georgetown Law provided to explain a suspicious-looking offer of temporary work to unemployed graduates, one of which claimed that the university — which was also the graduates’ employer — didn’t know where those alums were.

But I’m a wonk and I’d like to have seen a few more numbers in this piece. For instance, when Segal says that only “a small fraction of graduates are winning the Big Law sweepstakes”, I’d like to know what that fraction is: roughly what proportion of the nation’s law graduates, each year, is going to get one of those $160,000-a-year jobs?

And then there’s this:

In the Wonderland of these statistics, a remarkable number of law school grads are not just busy — they are raking it in. Many schools, even those that have failed to break into the U.S. News top 40, state that the median starting salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000. That seems highly unlikely, given that Harvard and Yale, at the top of the pile, list the exact same figure.

Even at Harvard and Yale I’m suspicious of that $160,000 figure; for the non-top-tier colleges, it’s clearly fictional. No matter how many of your graduates go on to $160,000-a-year jobs, there’s always going to be a significant number who earn a lot less than that and there are going to be almost none who earn more. As a result, the mode might be $160,000, but the median will never be that high. (And in reality the distribution of law-grad salaries is highly bimodal, with the first mode at a much lower level.)

Dean Baker has a more serious criticism of Segal’s piece, noting that “most of the new jobs that are being created are at the top and the bottom of the skills level”. If that’s the case, he says, “then the NYT has seriously misrepresented the state of the legal market”.

I wouldn’t go that far. For one thing, I’m not sure that someone clutching a law degree from Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego really counts as being at the top of the skills level; Segal’s whole point is that lower-tier law schools are churning out graduates who would have been better off not getting a graduate degree at all, partly because they could put their skills to better use in the world of employment rather than racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans.

But Baker’s point is well taken: “the economy,” he says, “could simply be suffering from a situation in which there are too few jobs in total”. Given the NYT acreage afforded him, Segal could and should have spent a little time looking at how the number of law-school graduates has changed over time and how their employment prospects have changed as well. If the number of graduates is holding roughly constant even as the number of jobs has plunged, then that looks like a problem with the broad economy more than a problem of law school mendacity.

Let’s say I earn $50,000 a year, and a widget costs $1,000. Then my pay goes up 3%, while the cost of the widget goes up 10%—year after year. Would you say that the widget has been getting more affordable over time? Stanley Fish would. Fish is approvingly citing a new book from Robert Archibald and David Feldman, which he quotes saying that “for most families higher education is more affordable than it was in the past”:

Here their target is a way of framing the issue. Usually the question asked is, “What percentage of a family’s income goes to the cost of higher education?” Archibald and Feldman prefer to “ask instead whether the amount left over after subtracting the cost of college is rising or falling over time.” The answer they give (buttressed by statistical tables) is “rising”: what their data show is that “over long stretches of time, college costs have been rising at a faster pace than income per worker, yet the average worker’s actual dollar income has gone up by more than the costs, leaving more resources on the family to spend on other things.”

I fear to think what statistical sleight-of-hand might be hidden in that qualifier about “over long stretches of time,” especially since in recent years real college costs have continued to rise fast even as real median incomes have gone nowhere or shrunk. But in general this approach to gauging affordability is absolutely bonkers: the percentage rise in price is completely ignored, and only the dollar rise in price matters. Using this technique, just about anything can be considered “more affordable than it was in the past.” If the widget rises in cost by $100 and my annual pay goes up by $1,500, that does not in and of itself settle the question of whether the widget has become more affordable.

What’s more, I haven’t read the book, but Fish’s take does seem to be at odds with its official blurb:

A technological trio of broad economic forces has come together in the last thirty years to cause higher education costs…

A college education has become less reachable to a broad swathe of the American public at the same time that the market demand for highly educated people has soared. This affordability problem has deep roots. The authors explore how cost pressure, the changing wage structure of the US economy, and the complexity of financial aid policy combine to reduce access to higher education below what we need in the 21st century labor market.

I’m also completely unconvinced by Fish’s explanation of the main reason behind cost inflation at colleges:

Chief among these is the change in the sophistication and cost of the technology that has at once transformed the setting of higher education and become one of the areas of knowledge higher education must impart to students. Students expect to be instructed in the new technologies, and that instruction requires their installation, and then as new refinements emerge, their re-installation. “[A] modern university must provide students with an up-to-date education that familiarizes students with the techniques and associated machinery that are used in the workplace the students must enter.”

Were colleges and universities to strike a Luddite stance and hold out for pencil, paper and blackboard instruction, they would “in effect be guilty of educational malpractice.” When it comes to incurring these new expenses, they “do not have a real choice.” In no sense, then, are changes in price “driven by any pathology in the higher education industry.

It’s true that computers are more expensive than pencils, and it’s surely true that some part of the typical college-tuition fee is spent on information technology. But we’re talking about fee inflation here: in order for Fish’s argument to hold water, IT costs at colleges would have to be rising faster than inflation year in and year out. Which strains credulity, in a world where IT is getting steadily cheaper and where a lot of IT services can now take place in the cloud. Even if the move into the cloud is only now beginning, I very much doubt that it’s ever going to result in a decrease in tuition fees.

The fact is that technology is a way of reducing the costs of education much more than it is a factor in their growth. That’s why Rupert Murdoch has just hired Joel Klein:

The likelihood that Murdoch’s education strategy will involve either charter schools or online college-diploma mills is very close to zero. Instead, it is all but certain to revolve around one of the most fertile areas of innovation today: the application of digital technology to learning. In the next few years, “what you’re going to see in educational software and new solutions and online learning is going to be game-changing,” says Klein, in terms of “the ability of new technology to both improve instruction and the quality of it through new learning platforms.”

“Archibald and Feldman,” says Fish, “allow us to say that at least in the area of costs the fault lies not in ourselves, but in the stars.” Which I’m sure is convenient for Fish, who describes himself as a “dean who encountered the rising costs of personnel, laboratory equipment, security, compliance demands, information systems and much more every day.” But it’s not particularly believable.

Gerald Epstein and Jessica Carrick-Hagenbarth have a 41-page paper out which gets boiled down quite effectively to its title: “Financial Economists, Financial Interests and Dark Corners of the Meltdown: It’s Time to set Ethical Standards for the Economics Profession”.

They took a group of 19 academic financial economists and looked for possible conflicts of interest — board memberships of financial institutions, consultancies, that kind of thing. They conclude:

In this study, we showed that the great majority of two groups of prominent academic financial economists did not disclose their private financial affiliation even when writing pieces on financial reform. This presents a potential conflict of interest. If this pattern prevailed among academic financial economists more broadly this, in our view, would represent an even greater social problem. Academic economists serve as experts in the media, molding public opinion. They are also important players in government policy. If those that are creating the culture around financial regulation as well as influencing policy at the government level for financial reform also have a significant, if hidden, conflict of interest, our public is not likely to be well-served.

The findings understate the severity of the situation in the real world, where most consultancies and substantially all paid speeches are kept secret. Financial economists tend to make a lot of money, most of it from the financial sector rather than their putative employers, and they’re very unlikely to disclose their income or their conflicts in public.

Paul Krugman is an interesting case in point:

Before I went to work for the NY Times I did a lot of paid speaking, mainly to investment bank conferences outside the US… My fee for overseas talks was usually $40-50K.

I do very little paid speaking now, and no consulting, because the New York Times has quite strict rules: basically I can only get paid for speaking to nonprofits that have no possible interest in influencing the content of the column. It’s a good rule – read Eric Alterman’s book “Sound and Fury” to see how speaking fees can corrupt pundits – though it meant that I took a substantial income cut to work for the Times.

Krugman is clearly comfortable with the idea that speaking fees can corrupt pundits, and thinks it’s a good idea that NYT columnists don’t accept them. Yet at the same time he had no problem accepting such fees as an economist, and I’m quite sure he never disclosed those fees when he was writing academic papers on financial subjects.

It seems obvious that when you’re regularly making significantly more than the median national annual personal income from giving a single speech, you’re prone to being captured by the people paying you all that money. And the secrecy makes things much worse. I once mentioned in passing on my blog a consultancy gig which I happened to know about and didn’t think was particularly secret. The consultant in question phoned me up extremely distraught, fearful that the employer, a hedge fund, would read my post and react to it with a whole parade of nasty possible actions. There’s no good reason for such secrecy on either the employer or the employee side — unless, of course, there’s something ethically suspect about the arrangement in the first place.

I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, but clearly more disclosure would be a very good idea. But it’s not going to happen: there’s too much money riding on the continuation of the status quo.

(Via Folbre)

Hello, Reuters readers. Thank you, Felix, for inviting me and Justin to guest blog while you're away. I promise to make the most of my newfound form of procrastination.

Over the weekend, the NYT ran a piece about academics rediscovering the "culture of poverty." The story goes that for decades it was taboo to offer social, as opposed to economic, explanations about why particular people and neighborhoods were poor—unless, of course, you belonged to a certain camp of conservative critic. According to the Times:

The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a "culture of poverty" to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable "tangle of pathology" of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.

Now, it seems, culture is again fair play. Over the past few years, culture-informed explorations of poverty have been seeping into the research literature. High-profile examples include these Princeton/Brookings papers about unmarried parents and this special issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (which led to a recent Congressional briefing). Nobel-winning economist George Akerlof goes down this path in his new book, Identity Economics: he and co-author Rachel Kranton argue that students decide how much to invest in their education (i.e., their earning potential) partly by whether they see themselves as fitting into the culture of the "nerd," the "jock" or the "burnout."

I'm all for understanding the nature of poverty, but the culture lens makes me nervous. Maybe that's because right after I read Identity Economics, I read The Trouble With Diversity, by Walter Benn Michaels, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One of the main arguments of that book is that there is a lurking danger in turning a conversation about economics (poor people don't have money) into a conversation about culture (poor people have different values and make different life decisions). The big risk: since Americans are loathe to judge one culture as superior to another, we will come to accept poverty as a valid alternative. You're not poor because you can't get a job that pays enough to cover your bills (a failure of education, the free market, etc)—you're poor because you are part of a different culture, which, in diversity-committed America, we all have to respect.

The other thing that worries me about the culture frame is that so much rests on the categories we use to try to capture "culture." Akerlof's nerd-jock-burnout rubric is clear-cut and colorful. But is that where the truly useful information lies?

One of the best things I've ever read about the nature of poverty is Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein's 1997 book, Making Ends Meet. Edin and Lein, a sociologist and anthropologist, spent long periods of time interviewing poor single mothers—most of whom both received welfare checks and undertook some sort of paid work. When deciding the right balance between welfare and work, the mothers certainly took into account which paid better. But they also considered which would allow them to be better mothers by spending more time with their children, and which would provide a more predictable (even if lower) stream of income. Devotion to full-time motherhood definitely reads as a cultural value. But does the preference for income predictability?

If we look at poverty in terms of culture, we might be missing an important part of the puzzle. Let's not forget something else that Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: “The reason people are poor is that they don’t have money.” Sometimes an economic problem is just an economic problem.

The noise surrounding a perceived rotation out of Israeli stocks by the Harvard endowment is really rather hilarious. Benjamin Joffe-Walt has managed to amass a whole sequence of quotes from people who have no idea what they’re talking about: one person is calling on “all academic institutions in the US” to follow Harvard’s lead and “divest from Israeli war crimes”; a second claims Harvard “still have tens of millions of dollars invested”; and a third comes up with the convoluted explanation* that it’s all to do with the fact that Morgan Stanley no longer considers Israel to be an emerging market:

“There are some funds which invest only in emerging markets,” continued Heen, the Cellcom CFO. “So Harvard had to sell our stock because Israel is no longer classified as an emerging market and they no longer have the ability to hold this stock within the emerging markets fund.”

Needless to say, university endowments, more than any other investors, are entirely unconstrained by such concerns.

The fact is that the Israeli holdings itemized in Harvard’s 13-F only added up to $41 million in the first place, or about 0.15% of Harvard’s total endowment. But it’s all pretty meaningless anyway, since the 13-F itself only accounts for a small fraction of the endowment’s total exposure.

The chances of this move being at all politically motivated are remote: the most recent concerted attempt that Joe Weisenthal can find to get Harvard to divest from Israel dates all the way back to 2002. And I’m sure that if you looked at all endowment 13-Fs on a quarterly basis, you’d find that every quarter a pretty large number of endowments will turn out to have sold out of some small market or other. It’s just that by sheer coincidence, this time it’s the two big hot-button names, Harvard and Israel, and hence there’s lots of headlines.

Next quarter, or the one after that, a few Israeli holdings are bound to reappear in Harvard’s 13-F. I wonder whether anybody will notice that.

*Update: The explanation might be convoluted and implausible, but according to a statement from Harvard, it also seems to be true!

The University has not divested from Israel. Israel was moved from the MSCI, our benchmark in emerging markets, to the EAFE index in May due to its successful growth.

Our emerging markets holdings were rebalanced accordingly. We have holdings in developed markets, including Israel, through outside managers in commingled accounts and indexes, which are not reported in the filing in question.

For some reason, it seems that Harvard’s EM holdings get itemized in its 13-F, while its EAFE holdings are run through external managers and don’t get itemized. No big story here.

If you fancy some iPad reading for the Memorial Day weekend, you could do a lot worse than to download this Tellus paper into GoodReader or similar. It’s titled “Educational Endowments and the Financial Crisis: Social Costs and Systemic Risks in the Shadow Banking System; the lead author, who writes very clearly and readably, is Joshua Humphreys.

I’m still working my way through the whole thing, but my initial impression is very positive. Humphreys points out in great detail, for instance, the downsides associated with giving university endowments charitable status and allowing them to issue tax-free bonds; I don’t know what happened to the tax which was being mooted a couple of years ago, but maybe it’s time to revisit it, especially since opposition to the idea even back then was so weak.

Humphreys also notes that university endowments in many ways exacerbated the financial crisis, as well as doing great harm to their own university budgets and their local economies. Meanwhile, their governing boards tend to be incredibly conflicted, with more than half a dozen trustees on Dartmouth’s board alone having managed investments for the endowment.

Humphreys has his own axe to grind: a long-time advocate of socially responsible investing, he makes the case that “as long-term investors, colleges and universities have an important stake in the sustainability of both the wider financial system and the broader economies in which they participate. Rather than contributing to systemic risk, endowments should therefore embrace their role as nonprofit stewards of sustainability.”

This makes sense to me, especially if university endowments are going to operate under the umbrella of charitable status. But even if they want to continue to chase absolute returns, it’s clear that the endowment model massively overestimated their appetite for illiquid assets. The idea was that because they’re investing with the longest conceivable time horizon, they can put a lot of their money into highly illiquid investments. But then they got bit by the fact that their universities were naturally likely to fall back on endowment monies at precisely the point at which illiquid markets seize up completely. Endowments should be countercyclical buffers, when it comes to universtity finances, not pro-cyclical exacerbators of financial crises.

And they should also be a lot more transparent than they are. Writes Humphreys:

When reported, school-specific data are nonstandardized, inconsistent, incomplete and fragmentary, and scattered across municipal, state, SEC and IRS filings, incommensurable annual reports, and costly proprietary financial databases unavailable to the general public.

There’s no excuse for this. Let’s force endowments to standardize their public reports, and show, rather than tell, just what their highly-paid employees are doing to deserve all their millions of dollars in remuneration. And let’s force them, too, to spend a lot more time concentrating on liquidity risk management, and to cast a skeptical eye on the amount of leverage that these institutions really need. Humphreys finds, for instance, a 2007article by Geraldine Fabrikant about Jack Meyer, containing this astonishing number:

When Mr. Meyer and his team were at Harvard, the endowment was known for making money by betting on small pricing differences between different kinds of securities.

For example, Mr. Meyer and his team might capitalize on the price difference between new Treasury issues and older ones. And to magnify gains, they would leverage those bets as much as 15 to 1.

That sounds very much like LTCM to me, and I think everybody can agree that we don’t want university endowments to be LTCM. And I’m not sure that it’s at all possible, with hindsight, to justify these kind of salaries:

It’s true that if you want massive returns on your endowment, you’re likely to end up paying massive salaries to the people who manage it. But you’re also likely to start spending future endowment gains you don’t yet have, and end up with a billion-dollar hole in the ground. It’s good for universities to be ambitious. But not if their ambitions expand to the point at which they feel the need to start selling off their own donated art just to keep the lights on.