My Little Hundred Million

In the podcast episode My Little Hundred Million, the Revisionist Podcast continues its dive into the deeply flawed American education system. In this episode, they focus on donations of over a hundred million dollars and how a vast majority of those donations go to schools that do not need the money. The podcast starts by describing how a successful engineer gifted a rural technical university in New Jersey a hundred million dollars and how unusual that this was. What was unusual was that the school being gifted the large sum of money wasn’t Harvard, MIT, or Princeton. The podcast then reads off a list of colleges that have received gifts above a hundred million dollars and almost all of them are top tier colleges that have endowments of several billion dollars. An example of how these gifts to these top universities aren’t needed is of when hedge fund manager Ken Griffin donated over a hundred million dollars to Harvard University to further open the gates of Harvard allowing more students have an opportunity to attend the prestigious institution. What this means is that Griffin wanted to make it easier for students from low income households to be able to receive financial aid and attend Harvard. However, Griffin’s hundred million barely nudges the gates of Harvard open an inch as Harvard is worth over 40 billion dollars. The fact that instead of spreading the wealth to universities across the country who desperately need money in order to remain open, wealthy people and organizations give large donations to schools that swim in money like Scrooge McDuck. Prestigious universities have plenty of resources to make sure that a qualified poor students will have the opportunity to attend the school yet they still receive almost all substantial gifts. The schools that need these hundred million dollar gifts are schools that face a serious prospect of closing down because of how much money they have lost by bending over backwards to provide financial aid to students who need it. These schools are not the ultra tier Ivy League schools who have the resources to help poor students, they are schools that have taken a hit in attendance from students who are able to pay the full tuition because they have cut spending on frivolous things. These are schools like Vassar who have reduced spending on their cafeteria food in order to be able to support low income students. People or organizations who are able to give these gifts need to realize that the Harvards or Columbias of the U.S. do not need any more money but rather the Vassars of the country, who have cut spending in order to support financial aid, need the help.