Campus clips

Yale’s endowment ended the fiscal year on June 30 with a value of $30.3 billion. The university’s holdings earned a 5.7 percent return. Harvard and Stanford both showed a 6.5 percent return; MIT’s was 8.8 percent. Spending from the endowment now represents 34 percent of Yale’s net revenue.

A petition campaign to put Georgetown law professor Nick Rosenkranz ’92, ’99JD, on the ballot for Yale’s Board of Trustees fell short of the 4,266 alumni signatures required. Rosenkranz collected 2,521 signatures. The petition process, like the trustee election itself, was administered by Election Services Corporation. In April, a committee of the Yale Alumni Association will announce its nominees for trustee.

Beginning next fall, parents and guardians in families that earn less than $75,000 per year will not have to pay anything toward their student’s Yale College term bill. (Previously, the threshold for a “zero parent share” financial aid package was $65,000.) The college is also reducing the amount students are expected to contribute, whether through campus jobs or other means, to $3,700 for each year. It is now $4,450 in the first year and $4,950 for subsequent years.

The AARP Foundation has filed a class-action suit against Yale, alleging that Yale’s wellness program for its unionized employees requires participants to disclose some medical information and illegally penalizes those who don’t take part. Yale’s Health Expectations Program requires participants to complete preventative health screenings at no cost and offers health coaching to those with certain health conditions. The program is voluntary, but nonparticipants have $25 per week deducted from their pay. Yale has declined to comment while the lawsuit is pending.

Yale-NUS College canceled a planned weeklong program for students on “Dialogue and Dissent in Singapore” in September. The move raised concerns that the authoritarian Singaporean government had interfered with the college’s academic freedom. Yale vice president (and former Yale-NUS president) Pericles Lewis was tasked with investigating the decision; his report concluded that, while errors were made in the administrative process, the decision was made internally without government interference.