The Meltdown

Meltdown Hits Harvard

Endowment falls 22 percent since June.

Harvard University's endowment has fallen 22 percent in the last four months, the largest drop in modern history, forcing the school to announce it will take a "hard look at hiring, staffing levels, and compensation." The university still has a lot of options: It announced plans to leverage its credit ratings—the highest granted by rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s—to issue bonds that improve Harvard’s cash position. And putting things further in perspective, the loss in its endowment's value, equal to about $8 billion, is larger the total value of any other university endowment save Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT.