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Comment by ahi | Hacker News Reader

According to Wikipedia, CMU currently has an endowment of $815m so rather huge donation. I was actually surprised by this. For some reason I thought CMU had one of those endowments where $250m gets a urinal named after you.

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I'm a CMU alum, and I asked about that once when they were mentioning "space naming opportunities". Very roughly and unofficially speaking, $50,000 gets you a classroom, $1,000,000 gets you a floor or wing, and $20 million gets you a department. Apparently $265 million gets you a college.

$55 million (Tepper) in 2003 was the previous price...

Well, you expect the b-school to cost more than other departments, don't you :-).

The Tepper School of Business is a college at CMU just like the newly-named Marianna Brown Dietrich Humanities and Social Sciences college. The colleges contains departments such as English, Philosophy, etc.

Sorry, of course it is. I wasn't thinking straight.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation donated $20-40 million and got a building.

For those interested, here's a list of the actual valued naming opportunities. Although, it doesn't include anything about naming spaces. (Scroll to the bottom) https://www.cmu.edu/campaign/about/endowment.html

Right. This was something I remember was discussed quite a bit while I was a student there. CMU has a small endowment compared to the more established private colleges it is increasingly competing against.

  Harvard: 27.4 billion
  Stanford: 13.9 billion
  MIT: 8.3 billion
  Etc.

CMU has an extraordinarily low endowment. They were not hit as bad during the economic collapse and resulting recession.

They weren't hit as bad yes, but they suffer in many other ways from their small endowment. It's one reason why they have one of the highest tuition costs of any university.

Mayber they "were not hit as bad" in absolute dollars but their endowment was over $1 billion in early 2008. 20% seems like a pretty darn big hit to me.

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