Question: Harvard’s Endowment stands at $19.2 billion according to this article from the Harvard Crimson. That is an obscene figure (more than Yale and Princeton combined, also more than Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke and University of Chicago combined.) Also, it is an issue of size: in terms of the number of students enrolled, Harvard is larger than Yale and Princeton combined; but both Yale and Princeton have more books per capita in their libraries than Harvard.
So what? It is not like everyone takes their share of the books to their dorm room when they enroll and can only use those books throughout their education. Books are not distributed per capita. Harvard has about 30% more books than Yale, which means that, any given individual has access to 3,000,000 more books at Harvard than at Yale (Books that Harvard has and Yale lacks would make an impressive library on their own).

Even though Harvard almost twice the size of Yale, Yale leads in total alumni fundraising ($258 million, versus under $200 million from Harvard alumni):

Umm, Harvard just completed a $2.1 billion fundraising drive and exceeded its goals by about $200 million. I don’t think you wanna get into a fundraising pissing contest with Harvard.

Answer: 1. It is not obscene for Harvard to receive financial support from grateful alumni, nor to grow rich by investing those finances wisely.

2. I would have to research the question, but I believe Harvard may have been one of the schools that, according to a news headline, denied that they had engaged in tuition-related price-fixing but agreed not to do it in the future. See footnote 213 of the law review article that appears at http://share.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/3215/article.htm. If so, one might ask whether Harvard and those other schools could have afforded to allow a full investigation of the question and to take responsibility for damage that their behavior may have caused to students and to competing schools. In doing so, the accused schools might have given us all a demonstration of what it means to be worthy of respect, a class act.

3. That footnote also mentions the “Chivas Regal” effect in which less prestigious schools appear to raise their tuitions as much as possible without becoming more expensive than schools like Harvard. I can’t say whether Harvard’s rate of tuition increases has outstripped the rate of inflation or, if so, whether that has encouraged other schools across the country to make college financing more painful and less accessible for thousands of students. If these factors do all tend to point the finger at Harvard and other schools like it, then one might consider the tuition raises obscene in light of the massive endowments at Harvard and at other schools in a similar position.

4. One hopes that the funds provided by successful Harvard alumni are not employed in any zealous legal effort to wring student loan repayment from failed fellow alumni.

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