What is a University endowment really for?

It covers the base spend for most of the university but these institutions have added so many widgets over the last couple decades that the funds to pay for those results in tuition increasing. And, cuts to state funding.

In short, college is now an arms race.

Harvard is a special situation. Not many private schools outside the Ivy League can afford that support.

Sustaining serious research is not cheap.....departments like physics, molecular biology, etc generate some research funding, but things like electron microscopes don't come at a discount. Tuition, even at today's inflated rates, doesn't cover the operating costs of most institutions.

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Harvard is a special situation. Not many private schools outside the Ivy League can afford that support.

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Partially true, while Harvard is number 1, the University of Texas is number 3 , and Texas A&M is number 7 in the top 10 rankings by size of endowment.

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The medical centers, for example, like Vanderbilt which has 16 divisions all have endowed chairs that fund research fellow salaries and division lab support. Some of these can be 100k-200k per year along with other smaller endowments.

An endowment is essentially a pool of invested money which earns interest every year. The university uses the interest to supplement its funding. The ideal situation would be to have a university that is 100% funded by such an endowment, but that is not really feasible. Instead, individual endowment funds are typically set up to fund professorship chairs, scholarships, or building improvement.

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In the case of Harvard which has in excess of one billion dollars

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$32 Billion which Harvard has is technically in excess but there are dozens of university systems which have $1 Billion or more in their endowment fund.

The cases of Harvard & Yale ($32b & $20b) are outliers but give those two institutions interesting challenges & opportunities.