Some students want their colleges to divest from Israel. Here's what that really means.

College endowments, usually a sleepy part of a university's operations, are now front and center in the campus protests that are spreading across the nation, with students holding up signs with slogans such as "Disclose! Divest!" and "Divest from death now!"

These demands are central to the student protesters' efforts, with many of the students condemning what they see as their universities' financial support for Israel's war in Gaza. At Brown University, for example, student protesters charge that the school's $6.6 billion endowment will remain "complicit" until it divests "from Israel and the military-industrial complex."

The push for schools to divest from Israel is putting a spotlight on the world of college endowments, while also raising questions about the effectiveness of divestment as a tool to enact change. To be sure, colleges aren't strangers to calls for divestment, with student protesters in the 1980s demanding that institutions pull money from companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa. More recently, college students have pushed universities to cut their financial ties with the fossil fuel industry.