How do these numbers work out though? MIT probably isn't the richest university there is, but I would expect it to be pretty far up there. Even if all 2000 unis spent as much as MIT did, it would only add up to roughly 80% of the profit — and I would expect most universities to have far less budget than MIT. So is there a set of big whale universities who are paying way more?
MIT is "tiny" by international standards. According their own site they have less than 12,000 students.
The largest universities are distance learning organisations and large groups of affilianted colleges or university systems.
E.g. Indira Gandhi National Open University has an enrollment of 7.1 million students (distance learning) and National University of Bangladesh about 2 million (affiliate colleges). Iran's Islamic Azad university system has ~1m.
The US also has a long list of much bigger universities/university systems. E.g. SUNY, Cal State, University of Phoenix, UC, UNC all have more than 200k students each.
So I'd imagine MIT makes up far less than 1/2000th of the student and staff population.
Not specifically aimed at MIT, but wouldn’t such a large unspent endowment not (at least casually) suggest a failure to invest in research / students / etc.
Great question. As I understand, uni endowments work similar to sovereign wealth funds: You spend a portion of annual investment gains, but not the principal. So, conservatively, MIT earns 4% per year on the invested principal (25B USD), and maybe takes 3% of that return for spending. That would be and extra 0.75B USD per year in their budget. That is massive. Look at the annual budget for other world class tech unis like Swiss EFPL or ETH to understand the size of this endowment bump, relative to total budget.
