Meltdown Hits Harvard

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.