A brand new report from authorities watchdog group OpenTheBooks.com tallies up federal cash issued to 10 elite non-public universities: the eight that make up the Ivy League—Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, College of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, and Dartmouth School—plus Northwestern and Stanford.
Between 2018–2022, these 10 universities obtained $33.1 billion in federal contracts and grants. The most important recipient was Stanford, with simply over $7 billion; Dartmouth was the one establishment to not obtain not less than $1 billion, capping out at simply over $755 million.
Of the $33 billion complete, the report notes, solely about $4.18 billion got here within the type of contracts, through which work is completed on behalf of a federal company that then owns the outcomes; the rest, greater than $28.9 billion, was distributed as grants, whereby an establishment receives authorities cash to fund its personal tasks.
In some circumstances, universities obtain more cash per yr from the federal government than from their college students: Within the 2021–22 faculty yr, Princeton College took in almost $145 million in web tuition and charges (tuition paid minus scholarships disbursed), however it obtained over $362 million in authorities grants and contracts—greater than twice the quantity it obtained in tuition. Within the 2022–2023 faculty yr, Yale took in additional than $458 million in web tuition and room and board prices, however it introduced in a whopping $1.038 billion in authorities grant and contract revenue.
As non-public establishments, the colleges in query are nominally meant to be funded by pupil tuition and donations; most even have beneficiant endowments, belongings invested to assist the establishment over an extended time frame. And federal grant applications exist which are supposed to fund analysis into tasks that might have bigger societal advantages: For instance, the primary COVID-19 vaccines had been developed partly at Emory College and Vanderbilt College, with funding from the Nationwide Institutes of Well being.
However the endowments themselves solid doubt on whether or not this cash is actually obligatory. Because the OpenTheBooks.com report notes, within the 5 years throughout which the ten universities in query obtained over $33 billion in authorities funds, additionally they grew their collective endowments by $64.8 billion. Stanford, which took in over $7 billion in authorities funds, grew its endowment from $26.5 billion to $36.5 billion over the identical interval.
“Many of these schools have received attention for left-wing agitation and advocacy from students and administrators alike in the past five years,” notes OpenTheBooks.com founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski. “Several have come under fire most recently for their responses to the October 7th attacks on Israel by the Hamas terror group.”
Final week, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–N.Y.) advised Fox Information that “U.S. taxpayer dollars should be prohibited from funding any institution that promotes antisemitism or anti-Israel bigotry, and House Republicans will hold these extremist institutions accountable for failing their students.” Equally, when he ran for workplace in 2021, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) referred to as for the federal government to “seize the assets” of nonprofits whose politics he disagreed with—together with Harvard’s endowment—which he known as “fundamentally cancers on society.”
However that goes a lot too far. Non-public universities and the scholars who attend them ought to be free to talk their minds about any challenge by any means with out worry of presidency reprisal. Anti-Israel protests, even these with offensive and incendiary rhetoric, are essentially First Modification-protected.
Somewhat, the federal government ought to rethink the cash it provides to personal establishments as a result of, simply as with billion-dollar firms asking for tax incentives, universities sitting on multibillion-dollar battle chests ought to shoulder extra of the burden for their very own expenditures.