Board of Trustees Chairman Stephen Mandel '78 and his wife Sue Mandel pledged $25 million to a new endowment for Teach For America in an attempt to ensure that TFA which places recent college graduates in low-income schools across the nation has a stable source of revenue and can increase the number of communities it targets, The Boston Globe reported. Eli Broad of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation initiated the endowment idea. The donation was also matched by two other organizations, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the Robertson Foundation, totaling $100 million for the new endowment. The endowment will initially generate 2 percent of TFA's $200 million budget but will increase in future years, TFA founder Wendy Kopp said in an interview with The Globe.
A national survey examining the emotional health of 200,000 college freshmen found that the percentage of students who considered their emotional health "above average" dropped to 52 percent in 2010, the lowest level since the survey was first conducted in 1985, The New York Times reported. This decline in emotional health may be due to increased academic pressure and uncertainty among students regarding their financial stability, according to The Times. The study, "The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010," also found that women have a less favorable perception of their emotional health than men. While this trend has been true since the survey's inception, the gap between men and women has increased significantly in recent years. The gap in perceived health between genders may be attributable to differences in how male and female students spend their free time or may result from women's willingness to admit when they are experiencing stress, according to several higher education experts interviewed by The Times.
University endowments experienced an average increase of 11.9 percent in their returns for fiscal year 2010 as they rebounded from an 18.7 percent loss the previous year, according to the Nacubo-Commonfund Study of Endowments released on Wednesday. Despite the gains, the combined endowment of the 850 institutions studied which totals $346.5 billion remains $15.1 million lower than its 2008 pre-recession level, The New York Times reported. Executives from the Commonfund Institute and the National Association of College and University Business Officers, which cosponsored the survey, said in interviews with The Times that they are hopeful that the endowments will continue to rise given the strong first half of fiscal year 2011. Endowment performance at different universities across the country varied greatly, according to The Times. Among the schools with the 200 largest endowments, Syracuse University rebounded the most, as its $850 million endowment gained 29 percent, The Times reported.
