Love this: In early September, endowment officials announced that they had lost $10-billon, a 27-percent drop... Vanity Fair sent a reporter to Cambridge this year to assess the damage. She was told that the university had lowered thermostats by four degrees and would no longer be serving free coffee [because their endowment was "only" ~30 billion].

Btw, endowment or no endowment, Harvard is not in business to give away free degrees. Indeed 10 to 15 percent of students in any given class at Harvard are legacies, who pay a LOT for a Harvard undergrad degree, which, by the way, isn't worth as much as people think.. http://slate.com/id/2112215/