Harvard and Yale plan for fiscal cuts

guardian.co.uk : Harvard and Yale universities lost 30% of the value of their endowments in the last year due to the financial crisis.Harvard’s endowment dropped by $11billion to $26 billion in the year to the end of June, according to the Harvard Management Company, which oversees the endowment. Excluding donations and distributions, the decline in investment performance amounted to 27.3%, the biggest in four decades.The losses have forced the university to lay off 275 staff and halt plans for a campus expansion across the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Yale’s endowment fell by $7 billion to $16 billion over the same period."We want to alert you to the fact that another round of reductions will be necessary,” Yale’s president, Richard Levin, wrote in a letter to the Yale community.This means that Yale will have an annual deficit of $150 million from 2010–11 to 2013–14, he wrote. He said the school would cut non-salary expenses by another 5% this year, having already reduced staff and non-salary expenses by 7.5%.