The rich get richer, 2016 edition: the 30 richest research universities in terms of the "per student" value of their endowments (at end of 2015)

Here are the 30 richest research universities (i.e., schools with PhD programs in multiple fields) in term of the "per student" value of their endowments; the per student value follows in parentheses (rounded to the nearest thousand).

1.  Princeton University ($2,809,000)

2.  Yale University ($2,073,000)

3.  Harvard University ($1,736,000)

4.  Stanford University ($1,323,000)

5.  Massachussetts Institute of Technology ($1,190,000)

6.  California Institute of Technology ($995,000)

7.  Rice University ($839,000)

8.  University of Notre Dame ($703,000)

9.  Northwestern University ($501,000)

10. University of Chicago ($495,000)

11. Duke University ($491,000)

12. University of Pennsylvania ($476,000)

13. Washington University, St. Louis ($470,000)

14. Emory University ($453,000)

15. Brown University ($335,000)

16. Vanderbilt University ($326,000)

17. Columbia University ($323,000)

18. Cornell University ($276,000)

19. University of Virginia ($260,000)

20. University of California, San Francisco ($237,000)

21. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor ($228,000)

22. University of Rochester ($185,000)

23. Texas A&M University System ($171,000)

24. Case Western Reserve University ($165,000)

25. Johns Hopkins University ($157,000)

25. Boston College ($157,000)

27. Carnegie-Mellon University ($131,000)

28. University of Texas System ($111,000)

28. University of Southern California ($111,000)

30. University of North Carolina, Chapel hill ($103,000)

Note that there are many liberal arts (or primarily liberal arts) colleges that are even richer:  e.g., Pomona has an endowment worth $1,323,000 per student; Amherst, Swarthmore, Williams and Grinnell all have endowments worth over a million per student as well.  Dartmouth, which has some but not many graduate programs, clocks in at $740,000 per student; the University of Richmond at $679,000 per student, and Washington & Lee at $650,000 per student.

Note that the per student endowment does not reflect the value of other kinds of assets, such as real estate--Columbia, for example, owns a huge amount of New York real estate, as does New York University.