The media periodically run stories about the largest university endowments, but the gross figures are not nearly as revealing as the per student value of these endowments. Using 2011 figures, and putting aside Rockefeller University, which has only about 200 graduate students (yielding a per-student value of their endowment of $8,730,000 per student!), here are the top 20 universities in terms of the per student value of the endowment (counting all undergraduate and graduate students), with the per student figure in parentheses after the school name:
1. Princeton University ($2,251,315)
2. Yale University ($1,670,172)
3. Harvard University ($1,496,603)
4. Stanford University ($1,078,627)
5. Massachussetts Institute of Technology ($891,000)
6. California Institute of Technology ($805,454)
7. Rice University ($729,672)
8. Dartmouth College ($559,508)
9. University of Notre Dame ($535,042)
10. University of Chicago ($426,948)
11. Duke University ($390,952)
12. Emory University ($388,489)
13. Northwestern University ($374,114)
13. Washington University, St. Louis ($374,468)
15. University of Pennsylvania ($309,014)
16. Brown University ($290,348)
17. Columbia University ($282,246)
18. Vanderbilt University ($268,897)
19. Cornell University ($242,057)
20. University of Virginia ($231,116)
You'll see that the list corresponds rather well to the most prominent research universities, with a few exceptions. There are remarkable underperformers on this list of rich schools, after all: Emory, in particular, has precious few top 20 programs in any field, despite the vast wealth; something similar is true of Vanderbilt. Duke is really the only one of the rich Southern universities to have parlayed its wealth into academic excellence as a research university. Rice uses a lot of its fortune to keep tuition low and to insure a high-qaulity undergraduate experience; the latter is also true for Notre Dame.
University of Virginia has the highest per student value of its endowment among public universities at $231,116 (though even so, it is still out-performed as a research university by a dozen other publics). The University of Texas System, which boasts an impressive-looking $17 billion plus endowment, comprises so many students that the per-student value works out to less than half the value of the UVA endowment. Michigan does somewhat better, with a per student value of about $183,000.
There are other surprises when one looks at per student value of the endowment. Johns Hopkins University, a top 20 research university by most measures, has a per student value of its endowment of only $136,736. New York University and University of Southern California have both made major improvements over the last generation, and have gross endowments of two to three billion, roughly; yet the per student value of their endowments are quite low, relative to the competition. USC has a per student endowment of $95,311, while NYU is even lower, at $55,540 (which sheds some light, I suspect, on why the administration there fights unionization so aggressively--it needs cheap labor to do the undergraduate teaching, while still being able to recruit top-flight research faculty). Obviously schools short on endowment resources make it up in tuition or other cost-saving measures (like adjuncts, grad-student labor etc.).
Finally, just by way of comparison, Williams College, a wealthy liberal arts college (so focused wholly on undergraduate education) has an endowment that is worth $811,000 per student! This is not atypical for the elite and best-established liberal arts colleges in the United States.
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