Last month the Boston Globe reported that the chairman of both the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee sent joint letters to 56 colleges and universities with endowments of $1 billion or more. The letter asked 13 sets of questions covering topics ranging from categories of assets to management costs to spending policies. While it is now a common practice for the congressional tax writing committees to investigate various types of tax-exempt organizations – see the recent Senate Finance scrutiny of private museums opened by individual collectors and the 2008 Senate Finance letter to colleges and universities about their financial practices – it is interesting and perhaps significant that this latest inquiry is a joint one by committee chairmen in both chambers (including also the chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight). The current set of inquiries come in the wake of endowments (mostly) recovering from the Great Recession, a Congressional Research Service report focusing on college and university endowments, and prominent calls for wealthy educational institutions to provide more need-based financial aid (for example, see the recent NY Times Op-Ed by Victor Fleischer (San Diego)).
Additional coverage: BloombergBusinessInside Higher Ed.
Lloyd Mayer
