The 1st thing that you need to understand is that endowments are much more important & vital for private universities than they are for public universities. That is a fundamental difference between the two. Their sole purpose is to provide additional income for investing & non-essential expenditures. What kind of expenditure do you think football qualifies as? If you're willing to be objective & unbiased, there is absolutely nothing misleading about endowments because you can't name a single example of another private university in a similar financial situation as MIA that routinely contends for divisional, conference or national championships.