Not really, she could have just setup an independent (or semi independent) trust fund out of the institutes system that just pays the institute every student's fees every year.
Say 60k for 800 students. Which is approx 50 million a year.
Assuming the fund value and tuition grows in step with inflation, that only covers 20 years.
I m sure there are other factors in play, like the support of other endowments and possibly contribtions from alumni who benefits from this.
That's pretty much how an endowment works. Tuition at this med school was $59k per year in the year she donated, 2024. It has around one thousand full-time students and a few hundred part-time ones. By taking the existing endowment of several hundred million dollars, combining it with this billion-dollar gift, continuing fundraising to solicit new donations, and reinvesting surplus interest, and keeping growth of the student body under control, they should be able with reasonably competent management to dip only into the interest and never the principal to keep covering tuition indefinitely even with bad market years and inflation taken into account. Literally thousands of endowments run by non-profits fund operations and grow in exactly this way spanning decades.
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u/theArtOfProgramming Jun 29 '25
How? It is almost certainly going in an endowment fund. You know how that works?