High tuition costs got you worried? Fuhgeddaboudit.
That’s just what Dean Nicholas Allard of New York’s own Brooklyn Law School said last week — not in so many words — when the school decided to tap its own balance sheet and lower tuition by 15 percent for incoming students this fall.
Brooklyn Law School chose to undertake its own cost-cutting campaign and sell off some assets in order to make education more affordable for its student body.
To meet its goal, the school, which shrewdly began acquiring buildings in the 1980s, sold just six of its multifamily properties in Brooklyn Heights for $36.5 million to Jared Kushner’s growing real-estate empire, capitalizing on Brooklyn’s strong market.
Allard’s action is so counterintuitive to today’s higher-education institutions that it deserves to be recognized.
Today virtually all kids and their families are forced to select a school because of its financial-aid package rather than its quality of education.
In contrast, the “not for profit” universities — in particular the private institutions — have never been better off financially, their coffers overflowing with a whopping $448 billion in endowment assets.
They invest their billions, too: The average college or university endowment earns an 11.7 percent return.
Wait, it gets better: In an economy in which pay has been falling for years, a university full professor makes on average $81,491 in total compensation.
And those who run the endowments are really raking it in.
At Harvard, for example, the top six endowment managers saw their pay jump 45 percent in 2011, totaling $29.5 million, an average of almost $5 million each.
New York’s public-university programs do an outstanding job providing quality education for a fair price, and now the prominent private Brooklyn Law School has taken action on its own. With almost half a trillion sitting in endowments at other colleges and universities, shouldn’t those schools learn a thing or two from Brooklyn?