Your School Sucks #2: Wazzu to Alumni--Drop Dead!

From the May 25th edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In the past two months, nearly 100 colleges have started exploring a financial concept that seems almost too good to be true: collecting hundreds of millions of dollars for long-term capital needs by taking out life-insurance policies on wealthy alumni.

The idea started with Oklahoma State University, which said this spring that it had secured some $270-million for its athletics program by setting up life-insurance policies on 27 boosters. The university said it would borrow $20-million to pay for the policies and be the sole beneficiary of the plans after the donors died.

Since then some of the country’s largest institutions—including Texas A&M and Washington State Universities, and the Universities of Georgia, Maryland at College Park, and Oklahoma—have inquired about the idea.

There’s a possible Monty Python “Bring Our Your Dead Boosters!” riff here, but I’ll leave it for another day.