Ivy League's Blues of an Illiquid Endowment Corpus

Bertie was in awe of his batchmate Sid, who after the grueling two years on the banks of the Sabarmati, had the motivation to do another MBA from an Ivy League college.

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When they caught up recently, Bertie took a while to reconcile the Sid who drank copious amounts of happy water of dubious parentage with the Sid sitting in front of him who was rolling the 'r' when he asked for water. The roller Sid, unsurprisingly, works for a bulge-bracket investment bank where he advises bulge-bracket private equity firms on what to do with their bulging portfolios.

"In the thick of it, ha, your Ivy alma mater?" Bertie ribbed Sid, expecting a Hindi expletive in response. Instead, Sid nodded and said in a low tone, "The man is after us." The 'he who cannot be named' was the Forty-Seventh President of the United States. Bertie now made peace with the fact that the rowdy Sid he knew and loved had been completely annexed by this investment banker.

"He wants us to pay him more taxes, and he won't give us any funding." Bertie had no idea why Sid was talking as if he were the spokesperson of his second MBA college, but decided to ignore it.

"That's how you balance the budget, no? Make a cost item into a revenue item." Bertie was in no mood to stop the ribbing, but Sid wasn't biting. "Tough times, man. And now he wants to stop foreign students from taking admission. How will we survive?" Bertie started seeing his friend as an endangered species whose face would soon feature on a 'Save the Sid' ad.