The College rightly prides itself on teaching students to think carefully about justice across race, class, gender, and time. It also sits on an endowment of extraordinary strength. The College’s endowment stood at roughly $3.5 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2023, $3.65 billion in FY 2024, and $3.9 billion in FY 2025, with a 10-year annualized return of 9.4 percent — well above the benchmark commonly cited as sufficient to preserve purchasing power over time.
Yet many of the workers who keep the College running earn wages that fall short of what it costs to live here. Recent postings list Dining Services utility workers earning as little as $18.75 an hour — about $22,500 annually for the 30-hour, 10-month schedule specified in the job description.
A full-time, year-round custodian assistant starts around $40,000 per year. Childcare substitutes earn $18 to $19 an hour, often without full-time hours.
These wages fall short of the cost of living in Berkshire County. According to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, a single adult in Berkshire County needs about $49,000 per year before taxes to meet basic needs; a parent with one child needs about $95,000. These figures cover necessities only: housing, food, transportation, medical care, child care, and basic communications.
How do we explain this gap between institutional wealth and worker wages? One answer often invoked is intergenerational equity, the idea that institutions should preserve resources so that future students receive the same level of support as those today.
An article by the Commonfund Institute published in the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges’ Trusteeship Magazine describes achieving intergenerational equity as a “singularly important” focus of endowment oversight. The National Association of College and University Business Officers stated that endowments “operate on the principle of intergenerational equity,” and institutions including Yale and the University of Virginia have invoked this principle in explaining their endowment strategies.
As a data scientist who studies injustice, I spend much of my time teaching students how to ground moral arguments in measurable realities. Intergenerational equity sounds compelling in the abstract. In many contexts, restraint in spending is appropriate — endowment returns fluctuate, donor restrictions matter, and colleges face real uncertainty as access to federal funding has come under attack. But at institutions like the College with extraordinary financial strength, the principle raises a harder question: How do we balance obligations to future generations with obligations to the people who make the institution function right now?
This is not a question the College can put off by pointing to constraints. The College experienced a significant decline in FY 2022, and much of the endowment is donor-restricted. But volatility and restrictions are precisely why institutions emphasize long-term averages and disciplined budgeting — and why it matters that, even after drawing roughly 4.5 to 5 percent annually for operations, the endowment has remained exceptionally strong.
At this rate, the College is not merely preserving resources for future students; it is accumulating them.
The College’s accumulation of resources forces an uncomfortable but necessary question: Why do so many current workers earn wages that do not meet the local cost of living?
I raise this question with care. I am not arguing for reckless spending or for abandoning long-term stewardship. Intergenerational equity is a real ethical commitment, but prudence is not the same as allowing asset growth to outpace commitments to basic economic security for essential workers. Intergenerational equity asks what we owe the future; it does not absolve us of what we owe the present.
Even modest changes would make a meaningful difference. The College’s annual endowment draw was roughly $150 million in FY 2023 and $178 million in FY 2024. If 50 workers received an average raise of $5,000 per year, the total cost — including payroll taxes and benefits — would be on the order of $300,000, or about 0.17 percent of the current annual draw. Not 17 percent — 0.17 percent. Even moving all of the lowest-paid workers to a local living wage would likely cost a few million dollars, not hundreds of millions, while having an outsized impact on family stability and well-being.
The College regularly asks students to think seriously about fairness across time. Future generations do deserve a well-resourced college. But so do the people who, today, clean classrooms, prepare meals, and maintain the grounds. The numbers suggest we do not have to choose between them.
Intergenerational equity should not be used to justify wages that fall short of basic living costs. True stewardship means ensuring that institutional prosperity is shared — not someday, but now.
Chad M. Topaz is a professor of complex systems.
