Universities’ tax-free borrowing rose sharply this year as elite schools try to make up for federal funding cuts — and take advantage of their tax-free status while they still have it.
American universities issued $26 billion in municipal bonds in the first half of 2025, nearly equal to their total for all of 2024, according to new data from Nuveen. Six elite schools that are to varying degrees in Trump’s crosshairs — Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Brown, Stanford, and Yale — accounted for more than 10% of the total, though their bond borrowings don’t come close to replacing the billions of dollars in federal funding under threat.