内容摘要：Kiarie, who is a rights defender and paralegal at the Nyando Social Justice Centre, accompanied the family to Opapo in March.

Kiarie, who is a rights defender and paralegal at the Nyando Social Justice Centre, accompanied the family to Opapo in March.

The new tax plans aim to increase taxes on what US universities earn from their endowments.So, what exactly is an endowment?

An endowment refers to funds or assets donated to a university to keep it financially sustained in the future.Endowments typically comprise charitable donations from alumni, other donors and companies.The bill before the US Congress sets tax rates for universities based on their effective endowments per student – by dividing their total endowments by the number of full-time students at the institution.

Earnings from investments made from endowments will be taxed, if the bill becomes law.Have universities been taxed so far?

Most colleges have not been taxed on their endowments for centuries.

The Revenue Act of 1909 exempted educational institutions as nonprofits which operate for public interest “exclusively for religious, charitable, or educational purposes”. As a result, educational institutions did not pay taxes on their investment gains.Since the year 2000, more than 50,000 Chinese PhD scholars in science and mathematics fields have remained in the US, pursuing scientific research and founding startups that in 2022 had a collective worth of $100bn.

They include 21 billion-dollar companies, also called unicorns, according to the NFAP.One of these notable unicorns is Pony.ai, an autonomous driving technology company founded in 2016 and currently valued on the NASDAQ exchange at $6.4bn. The company was launched by James Peng and Lou Tiancheng, both of whom attended Beijing-based Tsinghua University for their undergraduate degrees. Co-founder Peng holds a PhD from Stanford University.

Another company is online Asian grocery retailer Weee!, valued at $4.1bn, according to NFAP, and founded by Larry Liu, who came to the US to earn a master’s degree in business administration from the University of California, Davis, after completing his undergraduate degree in China.Ethiopia is thought to host about one-fifth of the world’s population of donkeys.