Tuitions Up, Endowments Down

Yesterday, I mentioned how rising tuition costs are making it more and more difficult for lower- and middle-class families to afford college. Today, the Wall Street Journal points out that increased tuition won’t be the only thing keeping students from higher education. The current economic crisis has also slashed university endowments, which could force schools to be less generous with financial aid packages:

Harvard University’s endowment suffered investment losses of at least 22 percent in the first four months of the school’s fiscal year, the latest evidence of the financial woes facing higher education.

The Harvard endowment, the biggest of any university, stood at $36.9 billion as of June 30, meaning the loss amounts to about $8 billion. That’s more than the entire endowments of all but six colleges, according to the latest official tally . . . . .

Other university endowments also are suffering, and many states are cutting public funding of higher education. Colleges are instituting hiring freezes, planning enrollment cuts and discussing steep tuition increases, intensifying worries about the impact of the recession and financial crisis on college access . . . .

Joni Finney, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies college economics, says she worries that public universities and less-wealthy, smaller private colleges may not be able to keep their doors open to all students. “If you go down the food chain of higher education, it’s harder and harder to deal with these kinds of cuts,” she says.