re: Alabama has an incredible building campaign going. They just refunded a $100M

I understand how it works, I deal with them everyday. However, there is an assigned breakout for each specific University and the "endowment" is thousands of individual endowments for all sorts of various things - the gifts are made to be held in perpetuity. The only spending that occurs is off of earnings and interest, and how much of it is spent is generally based off a spending policy.

Also - endowments have almost nothing to do with capital projects. Capital projects are built using a combination of donations, bonds and government funds, depending on the project. The only time endowments are associated with capital projects is generally when someone gives a large chunk of change to establish an endowment and put their name on a building, and in the end that endowment isn't actually used for the building (if it were, it wouldn't be an endowment, it would be what used to be called a temporary restricted gift, but that language has been removed in the last 6 months by new accounting standards).

Sorry, enough of that nerd shite.