Americas colleges are hoarding billions and yet still cry poor as Trump targets federal funding

Twenty years ago, maybe even ten, I’d have found stories about the administration cutting grants to universities and detonating thousands of campus-related jobs horrifying. But the education sob stories now flying off the presses have a gigantic lie of omission. Take Johns Hopkins.NBC News was one of many to highlight the “grave consequences” the new administration’s policies have had on the famed institution, noting “the changes will also have an economic impact in Baltimore because the university is the largest private employer in Maryland.” NBC pointed out that “about half of Johns Hopkins’ funding last year came from federal research dollars, according to a letter from Ron Daniels, the university’s president.” It seemed odd that the “largest private employer in Maryland” is half-funded by the federal “research dollars,” but I shrugged and went to the Johns Hopkins website to read the Daniels letter. When there’s money on the line and university presidents have time to compose their thoughts, expect the ultimate in soaring magniloquent resplenditude.

Daniels didn’t disappoint. In a letter titled “Our bond in a moment of challenge,” he explained that Johns Hopkins holds “a particular place in the firmament of American, indeed, international higher education.” Indeed, the firmament! More: “Because of our researchers’ extraordinary success in competing year after year for merit-based grants and contracts, we are, more than any other American university, deeply tethered to the compact between our sector and the federal government.Last year, for instance, nearly 50% of our total incoming funds was derived from research conducted on behalf of the federal government . . .” A short trip on the JHU site later I found myself at the Johns Hopkins Public Interest Investment Committee annual report, published in January. There, I learned that “as of June 2024, JHU’s endowment comprised more than 4,700 funds, e...