Yep. That's what I understand to be the dollar amount for Cornell's upcoming capital campaign. Sources close to MetaEzra tell us that the Dean of Human Ecology mentioned this figure to alums at a recent gathering. So that's what we'll run with until the capital campaign is officially announced on trustee weekend. Of the four billion, one billion will be for the Medical College in New York City, leaving three billion for the Ithaca campus. Weill, of course, just finished a very succesful 750 million dollar campaign. Sources say that roughly 25 percent of the money will be dedicated to financial aid concerns. If that's right, that's 750 million dollars in financial aid endowment, more than enough to cover the 20 million needed annually to match Harvard's (and Yale's and Stanford's and Princeton's and Columbia's) generous financial aid policies. (More to come on the university's financial aid situation soon.) Hopefully the Cornell Committment programs will be expanded as well. No word on where the rest of the money will go, but I imagine that half will go into the endowment and the other half to cover the University's continued and future construction efforts. For comparison purposes, Brown University is in the middle of a 1.5 billion dollar capital campaign, and Duke just finished a 2.4 billion dollar capaign. Further word on the street is that the "quiet phase" of the capital campaign has already been more succesful than the University anticipated. Maybe that four billion will turn into five billion? Of course, I encourage everybody to give what you can if you can afford it.
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