Rich Harvard, Poor Harvard

The new issue of Vanity Fair includes an article about Harvard University by Nina Munk (as well as a feature called The Sad, Suffering Ivy League). A summary of the article is available here.

I have three comments on this story:

a) The article shows that Harvard is probably not any smarter than the rest of us.

b) The article supports my idea that colleges should probably be taxed. If colleges are going to obtain millions (or billions) of dollars in donations, and pay millions of dollars to their fund managers and executives, and poorly invest large portions of their money, then they don't deserve to be treated as a non-profit organization.

c) Colleges should be forced to spend more of their endowment funds on student scholarships (possibly for less wealthy students at other schools), before they piss all their money down the toilet like Harvard seems to have done here.