Rainy Days in Higher Ed

Often considered vital to the financial health of private colleges and universities, endowments provide necessary income for the yearly budget as well as a safety net of savings for a rainy day – for if, say, the economy falls into a recession. Why, then, are leading academic institutions hoarding their money while slashing faculty, financial aid, and programs?

On Inside Higher Ed, Mission and Money co-authors Burton A. Weisbrod and Evelyn D. Asch give some perspective on the leading universities that are squirreling their savings away.

Hal Vogel on Risky Bubbles

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Harold Vogel, author of the just-published Financial Market Bubbles and Crashes talks about today’s stock prices in context of his model for bubbles.

College Football is Big Business

Pity the college football coach. With all those talented student-athletes, how much energy and time should he spend on the student versus the athlete?

For any coach at the 120 universities playing big-time football, the choice is easy if he does what the school’s contract rewards.Contracts specify “performance-based” bonuses, and so we examined coaches’ contracts to answer the question: How do football coaches’ rewards for winning games, attending to the athlete, compare with their rewards for advancing the student toward graduation? There’s no contest.

No one is surprised when a corporation talks about its devotion to the social good but then pays its CEO bonuses for raising profits. Likewise, it should be no surprise that despite talk about education, coaches are paid to win games. But it may be surprising how clear the contracts are in specifying what it takes for a coach to get bonuses.

Globalization and Human Rights

When globalization gets messy, we have a number of problems. It gets blamed for human rights violations, even while it has the potential to lift millions out of poverty. It forces us to engage governments that we might rather not deal with, and poses a dilemma of how best to do so.
In his new book, [...]

Lomborg: Carbon cuts likely to harm

Writing for The Washington Post, skeptical environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg discusses likely impacts of any required carbon cuts, and, crucially, the huge cost of carbon cuts versus other means of reducing emissions.