Our friend Jeff Yass of Susquehanna International Group had a fabulous piece in the WSJ about how to fix fat, tired and leftist colleges. It’s SO EASY!

Here’s an excerpt:

Seven in 10 Americans, including majorities from both parties, say higher ed is headed in the wrong direction, according to a recent Pew Research poll. Yet in 2025 donors gave nearly $80 billion to colleges and universities. Harvard raised $1.3 billion.

No matter how much money donors throw at the problem, classroom instruction at elite institutions keeps getting worse. In a 2024 survey at Harvard, 45% of students said they were reluctant to share views on controversial topics in class. Sixty percent of grades at Harvard College were A’s in the 2024-25 academic year, up from 24% in 2005-06. That doesn’t sound like an environment of rigorous debate and scholarship.

Reminds us of this old truism: The only thing hard about Harvard is getting in.

Harvard last reported its endowment at $59.9 billion. In fiscal 2025 the return on the endowment was 11.9%, and the university paid almost no taxes. Administrations at these schools whine about funding cuts because they feel entitled to taxpayer money, but they aren’t hurting.

For the same reason, private donors can’t make much of a difference at these schools. Donations to Ivy League schools get you invitations to cocktail parties and, for the big shots, your name on a building where activist professors who hate you teach classes in which you are the villain.

Here’s one helpful idea: any college that still has speech codes, a clear violation of freedom of speech and expression, should never get another dime of your money. Here is Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) rankings of the most restrictive speech codes: