Endowments Divesting Of Oil Stocks Threatens The University Mission While Doing Nothing To Reduce Carbon Emissions

Endowments Divesting Of Oil Stocks Threatens The University Mission While Doing Nothing To Reduce Carbon Emissions

A good number of the country's colleges and universities had a precarious financial outlook before the pandemic wreaked havoc with their budgets, and many of them will not survive if the Covid-19 pandemic results in an extended period without a full house of tuition-paying students.

And in an apparent attempt to make a bad situation even worse, activists agitating for universities to divest their shrinking portfolio of politically incorrect companies threaten to exacerbate their fiscal woes.

The biggest problem facing schools pre-pandemic is that the cohort of college-age citizens has begun declining and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, leaving institutions without strong national reputations or billion dollar endowments scrambling to attract their share of the market in a shrinking pool. The less well-known liberal arts colleges and smaller regional public universities are most at risk: their students tend to have the least allegiance to pursuing a college degree and are more likely to delay or give up on college altogether if it becomes more difficult to accomplish.

Despite the constant hand wringing about the high cost of college, very few schools have the leverage to extract more tuition from their students, and they must provide generous financial aid to