Ranting to /dev/null

Covenant's budget

As Randy Smith points out, Covenant's IRS Form 990s are all available online at Guidestar. I won't link directly to any documents, because registration is required, but they're all up there.

The college had gross revenues of $28 million and seems to have had expenses of $23 million in fiscal year 2006. I've only done a cursory reading of the form, which is quite long, but let me start by saying that the difference there is not an indicator that the college should cut tuition. A good educational institution shouldn't be spending its entire budget every year. Though the stock market went gang-busters last year, it sure doesn't look like it's doing that this year, so having that buffer is an entirely responsible thing to do. Save in the fat years so you don't starve in the lean years, etc. I may not like the policy choices the administration is making, but their financial planning, on a cursory examination anyways, seems unimpeachable, and I'm quite pleased to learn that the college is in as good a shape as it seems to be.

Let me also say that no one can possibly criticize the administration of Covenant for using their positions for unreasonable personal gain. President Nielson seems to be the highest-compensated person at the college--which seems appropriate--and he's simply making a reasonably-comfortable upper-middle-class living. No one's getting rich here. So even as I criticize the administration for its decisions, I cannot but laud their willingness to work for far less than they could elsewhere. Income from personal investments doesn't seem to show up, but that's of no consequence for our purposes, and they're obviously able to invest their funds as they see fit (subject to certain technical, ethical considerations resulting from their employment situation). The only way they could be compensated more than what the Form 990 indicates involves illegalities that I refuse to even consider as possibilities. I may not agree with them, but they're all honorable men.

Having said that, I'll say again that attempting to restrict one's giving to the school as a way of effecting institutional change is utterly futile, and now I've got the numbers to back it up. Covenant is required to break down its expenses by category, and the smallest major category is the library, but even that gets almost $1 million. This means that if you wanted the college to spend more than that on the library you'd have to earmark more than $1 million to make any changes. One of the larger categories, direct academic expenditures, is in excess of $7 million. Increasing the size of that by earmarking is just unfeasible.

So let me finish by saying that the college, to my non-accounting, five-minute examination, seems to be in reasonable financial health (they always need more money, but don't seem in immediate danger), but is large enough that earmarking is just a gesture at best. But because direct giving makes up almost 25% of their budget, a boycott does have the potential to create a bit of a pinch. Probably not so much that the college would be in financial danger--they've independent sources of funding--but potentially enough to be annoying.