(NewsNation) — The country’s eight prestigious Ivy League colleges and universities took in more than $6 billion in federal funding in fiscal year 2023, but how those institutions of higher education are using tax dollars has raised eyebrows over the use of public money.
Ivy League schools like Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania have been targeted by President Donald Trump recently. Trump withheld $175 million in federal money from UPenn over its policy of allowing transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports.
Trump also canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts from Columbia after the White House said the university failed to protect Jewish students.
However, Trump’s actions come as a NewsNation probe into Ivy League funding found that the eight Ivy League schools are sitting on more than $185 billion in endowment money, including $50 billion at Harvard and $41 billion at Yale.
Yet NewsNation’s analysis of the school’s audited financial statements shows that the majority of public funding given to Ivy League schools goes to indirect recovery costs, which are also considered on-campus overhead. For instance, Harvard takes approximately 69% of the top of federal research grants for the on-campus overhead, while Yale takes about 67.5%, followed by Columbia (64.5%) and Cornell and Dartmouth (64%).
“The grants are designed to do good things, and many of them do,” Benjamin Ginsberg, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, told NewsNation. “But universities have tried to make a little bit of money on those activities, and so they charge overhead on federal research dollars, and that money is not spent on the nominal activity for which the grant is given.”
When adjusted, of the approximate $820 million Harvard took in for research, only about $248 million went for research, NewsNation found. At Columbia, which received $1.5 billion in research grants, only about $400 million was devoted to research after it took 64.5% for overhead.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Ginsberg told NewsNation, adding that rather than spending tax dollars on building improvements and repairs, tax dollars are being spent on hiring more bureaucrats.
However, as Trump has held back federal funding, the National Institutes of Health has recently installed a 15% cap on federal research funding that the Ivy League schools receive, meaning that even deeper cuts will be taken in tax dollars being sent to the institutions. Also, Ivy League universities are among more than 50 higher education institutions being investigated for their continued diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Scott Walter, the president of Capital Research Center, told NewsNation that Trump is doing what is right in starting conversations about how universities like Columbia are funded and how the respective schools are using those dollars.
“Nobody should be able to feed at the federal trough without having to justify themselves without Americans understanding what they’re getting from the rest of us,” Walter said. “This is absolutely the conversation we need to be having. Some of that money will get justified, and some of it will not.”