Etc...

Seat belt fastened?

How nice, a Polish motorist thought, as another driver stopped by his disabled car on a German autobahn one day last week to offer a tow. It was accepted, and in short order the vehicles were cabled together. And off they went, with the visitor remaining in his own. Soon, they were hurtling along at 100 m.p.h. By the time police arrived on the scene, they were stopped again, but only after the towee had flashed his lights , blared his horn, and swerved from side to side in a frantic effort to end the ordeal. Then it was the rescuer's turn to go for a ride ... with the officers.

In the past 10 years, the number of colleges and universities with endowments of $1 billion or more has gone from 17 to 47, according to the Associated Press. The wealthiest of them all is Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., which has accumulated a whopping $22 billion. The AP did its calculations using data collected by the US Department of Education and from several college guides. Ivy League institutions, as you might expect, are well represented at the upper end of the spectrum. The top 20 best-endowed schools, in billions of dollars:

Harvard University $22.1
Yale University $12.7
U. of Texas Systems $10.3
Princeton University $9.9
Stanford University $9.9
Massachusetts $5.8 Institute of Technology
University of California $4.7
Emory University $4.5
Columbia University $4.5
Texas A&M System* $4.4
University of Michigan $4.2
U. of Pennsylvania $4.0
Washington U. (Mo.) $4.0
Northwestern U. $3.7
University of Chicago $3.6
Duke University $3.3
Rice University $3.3
Cornell University $3.2
U. of Notre Dame $3.0
University of Virginia $2.8 * includes assets of supporting foundations