[21echoes]

Invests it, and runs the university on the returns. Assuming a 4% yearly rate of return, then that's around $1.5B a year in money available for operating expenses. As a point of comparison, Facebook spends ~10x that (~$15B), Uber spends ~2x that ($3B), etc. Harvard obviously has additional revenue streams, but there you go.

[jldugger]

Comparing tech firm operational costs to universities is a bit ridiculous -- Facebook runs multiple private datacenters globally. Most universities get by with a dozen clustered on campus serving administrative, educational and research objectives. It also serves more or less the planet, whereas the Harvards and Berkeleys of the world exist to serve a few dozen thousand at at time.

$1.5B pays for quite a bit of research. Or, more accurately, a lot of real estate speculation for the board of trustees to play.

[tikhonj]

Isn't most research funded out of external industry and government grants that also pay into the university (ie grant overhead)?

Given that even most top research universities get by on a fraction of Harvard's endowment—while running largely comparable research programs—it's definitely possible to do without. Harvard obviously does strong research, but not that much stronger than the rest of the top 100 (top 200? 500?) universities. Certainly not 10–50× stronger!

My impression is that what really makes Harvard and other highly endowed universities stand out is their really aggressive financial aid. That's probably one of the things that's almost entirely funded out of the endowment as opposed to external sources or tuition and fees.

[21echoes]

Of course! The point was to put the number next to a number known by the typical HN reader, not to imply the businesses were at all similar.

> Most universities get by with a dozen clustered on campus serving administrative, educational and research objectives

... A dozen what?

[narsil]

> > Most universities get by with a dozen clustered on campus serving administrative, educational and research objectives > > ... A dozen what?

Looks like GP meant "a dozen data-centers", to compare the costs.

[21echoes]

I figured that, but I wanted to give the chance at clarification, because we were mainly discussing operational expenses, and there's no way data centers even clears 1% of the cost of running Harvard