Well, it’s no wonder the left is so in love with the Ivy League. Turns out the academic equivalent of the NCAA tournament’s elite eight is practically drowning in federal funds. Incredibly, they collectively receive more money on average from federal grants and contracts than 16 entire states.
This is – of course – a story that has escaped the notice of an establishment media which relies on the Ivies to bolster their arguments for all manner of statist ideas, initiatives and victimology. But as reported only by Fox News and the UK’s Daily Mail, an exhaustive study by the group Open the Books reveals that forty-one billion dollars (that’s billion with a b) in taxpayer dollars were directed to these most elite – and unrelentingly leftist – ivory tower institutions between 2010 and 2015.
If that’s not enough for you, the study reveals that the Ivies – Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University and Yale University – also received almost twenty-six billion in federal payments over that period.
These federal payments dwarf the income they receive from tuition.
These institutions are anything but needy. In fact, since we’re drowning you in numbers, consider that they have now accumulated one-hundred nineteen million dollars in endowments. That works out to…wait for it…some two million dollars per student, which at their current rate of raking in cash from their cream-of-the-crop graduates and donors, is enough to provide a free education to every single one of their students forever. And yet they are on the government dole to a degree that is almost unimaginable. (You can click on the image below to enlarge.)
Remember that these are tax-free institutions. And as pointed out in the Daily Mail, “As a non-profit education institution, the Ivy League pays no tax on investment gains. They received a $9.6 billion tax break on the $27.3 billion growth of their endowment funds between 2011-15, according to the report.“
‘The Ivy League needs to pay its own way… The taxpayer gravy train needs to end,’ Adam Andrzejewski, founder of Open the Books, told Fox News. Andrzejewski also commented on how some of the federal money is spent:
Some of the federal spending makes sense, like the study of AIDs. But, he said, some are less defensible.
One grant was given to Cornell for nearly $1 million to study whale presence in the Virginia offshore wind energy area. Other grants to Ivy League schools were to study college binge drinking, ethics in Tanzania and sex chromosomes in turtles.
“They have got an endowment, right?” Andrzejewski said. “They can use their endowed funds – they don’t need public funds – to fund studies.”
He went on to compare what he calls Ivy League, Inc. to “a hedge fund with classes.”
Perhaps this study will open enough eyes to force some action on this Ivy League gravy train. But don’t hold your breath.
When you consider the breadth and depth of opposition to the president’s plan to “drain the swamp,” understand that the swamp-ocracy includes not just the creatures of the established political order, the permanent bureaucracy and the money changers in the nation’s capital, but those in the bubble-wrapped, pristine towers of academia who will certainly oppose Donald Trump’s efforts to reform government every bit as much as their less elegant swamp-dwelling soulmates.
