Pinched Oxford Wants $2.5B

Prestigious Oxford University is pleading poverty and has begun a campaign to raise funds to make it competitive with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton for academic talent, reports the Christian Science Monitor. The university—actually a collection of individual colleges—aims to raise $2.5 billion, but even that is chump change compared to Harvard's $34 billion endowment.

"The extent of endowments in the UK is minuscule in terms of what US universities are receiving," said one observer. "If you look at the extent of the endowment which universities around the world have, Oxford and Cambridge are well down the list." (More Oxford University stories.)