By most measures, American universities are the envy of the entire world.  Of the top thirty universities affiliated with Nobel Prize winners, for example, eighteen are in the United States.  According to the U.S. News and World Report rankings, of the top ten universities worldwide, only two – Oxford and Cambridge – are not in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, or New York.  Prospective students from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America flock to even the humblest American colleges, hoping to receive diplomas from the same system that once sheltered Albert Einstein, Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss. American universities are rich, too.  Harvard’s endowment, for instance, is approximately 35 billion dollars.  If one adds together just the endowments (and not the tuition income, grants, subsidies, athletics licensing fees, patent and copyright income, alumni donations, and total asset value) of the top ten American...(Read Full Article)