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What a fascinating and surprising analysis. In 2017 Caltech derived just 1.2% of its operating revenue from net tuition. Returns of $343M (12.3% of revenue) tax-free, on $3B. Tuition is $50K. 1992 budget $227M, endowment $580M… 2017 budget $653M, endowment $3.4B! A…non-profit?

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Conrad Bastable

@ConradBastable

· Dec 30, 2018

Cost Disease in Education partially a result of intentionally-limited supply in order to keep Investment Returns tax free. Endowment Profits already far more important than Tuition revenues... conradbastable.com/essays/the-unc

Conrad Bastable

@ConradBastable

Jan 9, 2019

Thanks! Glad you liked it! Also -- I'm so glad your first impulse was to go fact check the core assumptions on your own school. Really opens the eyes when you see it for yourself.

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Replying to

@ConradBastable

Absolutely. Thank you for writing it! It was interesting to see that Caltech has a similar weird extra revenue/expense stream for JPL akin to Lincoln. I'm sure that complicates things…

4:01 AM · Jan 9, 2019Twitter Web Client

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Once you open 25 tabs worth of Financial Reports from every college you can think of, turns out a number have a major additional revenue stream. At the time, I thought MIT's Lincoln was anomaly. Now seems not so unusual. UPenn & Columbia have $1-5B revenue hospital platforms, etc