[kitrose]

According to Wikipedia, Penn has an endowment of over $22 billion.

Not enough in the piggy bank to cover?

[tzs]

The whole point of an endowment is to support whatever it was created to support in perpetuity. They do that by investing the endowment and using most of the income from those investments to support the endowment's mission, and a small part to grow the endowment over time.

Penn is spending around $1 billion/year from their endowment, which is a fairly reasonably amount for an endowment of $22 billion.

[sethev]

Penn's endowment distributed $1.1 billion last year. Endowments like this are managed to last a long time - indefinitely, even.

Penn itself is older than the United States - they're not going to start blowing through their endowment because of political trends over the last couple months (or next 4 years), even if they legally could.

[osnium123]

Endowments can be very restrictive and thus it’s hard to shuffle money around.

[nielsbot]

What are they for then?

[bitlax]

Oh I should try that one.

[binarycrusader]

As the other poster mentioned, endowments / donations often come with conditions attached that significantly restricts how money from them can be used.

[apical_dendrite]

Penn's budget is $4.7 billion (just the university, not including the hospitals). Even with a $22 billion endowment, they can only fund a fraction of that off of investment income.

And what are you even talking about "coming back to the taxpayers"? This isn't like a sports team holding a city hostage to get a new stadium. They apply for competitive grants to do particular research projects, then they do those projects. They aren't asking for a handout, they are being paid to provide a much-needed service (health research).

[kelnos]

Penn has a $22B endowment, and pulls around 5% out of that annually. That seems to be a reasonably safe number that will give them a good chance of at worst keeping the endowment's size constant. Sure, they can take out more every year (they'd have to take out more than 4x that to match Penn's current budget), but then their endowment would reduce in value every year and eventually run out. That would not be a good outcome.

[nielsbot]

What is an "activist degree"? (Is activism bad?)

[pclmulqdq]

The administrators, athletic coaches, and non-productive tenured professors all cost a lot, and their hands were in the pie before these students' were. By the way, the students in question are for the "activist degrees" you mentioned - they seem to all be in the humanities.