When comparing the two amounts, many Internet users draw disappointing conclusions about the financing of Russian universities and schools. We checked how correct it is.

The story became especially popular in 2015, when several large public pages on VKontakte posted posts with the same text: “The budget of Harvard University alone is almost twice as large as the Russian federal budget for education in 2011 and almost three times in 2014. This, in principle, is all you need to know about education in the Russian Federation.” Among them were publics with millions of people: World of History, “Why didn’t I know this?”, "Secrets of History", "Zen", "Leprosy" etc. This statement gained a new round of popularity in the spring of 2021, when several publics criticized the statement of Senator Alexander Pushkov, done them on the air of the program “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov”: “One trillion six hundred billion for science! What state can afford to allocate such funds if it is squeezed, if it is isolated, if it feels internally insecure?” Users of other social networks also make sad comparisons for Russian education, for example Twitter, Facebook, "Yandex.Zena" And LiveJournal.

Some publications on this topic, published in 2015, were more detailed than the messages on VKontakte. For example, one of the LiveJournal users brought the following statistics: in 2011, the budget of Harvard University was $32 billion, expenditures on education of the Russian federal budget were about $18.5 billion; in 2014 - $36.4 billion and about $13 billion, respectively. In 2021, the budget of one of the most prestigious universities in the world, according to reports from Internet users, increased to $40 billion and even $42 billion.

At the same time, official documents from Harvard University give completely different amounts. Thus, according to the financial report for 2011, the expenditure portion of its budget amounted to $3.9 billion. In 2014, this figure equaled $4.4 billion, and by 2020 grew up up to $5.4 billion in the Russian federal budget for 2022 provided spending on education in the amount of 1.24 trillion rubles. (about $17 billion).

However, these same financial statements contain the figures used in the popular comparison. But this is not the university’s budget, that is, the costs of its activities, but an endowment fund (it is also called an endowment, from the English endowment fund). How explained According to Harvard University's website, the fund is "a dedicated and ongoing source of funding to support the university's educational and research activities."

At the same time, there is a significant difference between the budget and the endowment fund. The endowment largely consists of donations made to the university by individuals (for example, its alumni) or organizations. These funds are collected into a single fund, which is managed by a management company. Every year, part of the income that the fund brings in is allocated to specific needs of the university - together with tuition fees and research subsidies, it forms the budget. In the case of Harvard University, about a third of its budget expenditures ($2 billion in 2021) cover from the endowment. “The endowment is a critically important strategic asset for us, but it’s not a $31 billion bank account, as much as I’d like it to be,” spoke in the fall of 2013, university president Drew Faust.

The creation of university endowments is not a purely American practice; since the mid-2000s, such funds have also appeared in Russia. Many Russian universities have their own endowment funds, both state-owned (for example, MGIMO, Higher School of Economics (HSE), Novosibirsk State And Far Eastern Federal universities) and private (for example, European University in St. Petersburg). However, in terms of volume they are significantly inferior to Harvard’s endowment - for example, HSE expenses in 2020 made up about 26.7 billion rubles, while the size of the university endowment is only about 1.2 billion rubles.