@Center: As I research more & more schools, I suspect that you may be right. I probably should not have started with St’ Paul’s School as it seems to be unusually generous with respect to its financial aid guidelines & parameters.
Apparently, SPS also offers scholarships not based on financial need in certain areas of the country. According to one CC poster, this is why SPS left the ISL athletic conference & joined the Five Schools League (now 6 schools = Andover, Exeter, Choate, Deerfield, NMH & St. Paul’s).
Culver Academies in Indiana is also very generous with financial aid & merit scholarships.
The Peddie School in New Jersey & Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania offer significant financial aid. George School in Pennsylvania & Kent School in Connecticut as well.
@Red Sox Fan 18: In post #27. Maybe schools should have financial aid requirements imposed upon them when reaching certain EPS (endowment per student) levels in order to retain tax exempt status.
If the intent of this thread is to inform parents of the relationship between endowments and financial aid than it is woefully incomplete and, in places, simply inaccurate.
The best analytical work done on this site on endowments and their relationship to FA was done by @GMTplus7 a few years back. One of his big insights was counterintuitive, that schools with smaller relative endowments award significant need-based aid. No discussion of this topic is complete without a grounding in this work. I cannot find these threads, but perhaps the moderator can.
@Publisher. You state that Kent School offers significant financial aid. It does NOT, as I outlined earlier in this thread based on CURRENT data. Please see its website.
“Kent School awards 29% of its students needs-based financial aid. They also award merit-based aid. I suspect that 15% or more of the students get merit-based aid, and that is how you and they get the 44% number. Kent actually gives a smaller percentage of their students needs-based aid than most peers, who offer needs-based aid to about 33-37% of their students.”
This is a very important topic increasingly for many parents. We should take care in presenting our analyses and ensure that the information we offer is accurate if we want the thread to be helpful.
Lots of heat currently on this thread, not much light.
Kent School’s Episcopal Scholarship offers up to half of the COA based on merit & up to 100% COA based on merit for those also demonstrating significant financial need.
In addition to the Episcopal Scholarship, Kent offers several other merit scholarships:
Kent Scholarship, Headmaster’s Scholarship & Partridge Scholarship.
@GreenIndian: Seems as though you are a bit of an angry poster & I do not understand why. Clearly you are confusing “financial aid” with “needs based aid”. “Financial Aid” includes both types of aid.
An average needs based aid of $39,100 seems significant to me as does financial aid awards to 44% of the students.
The average financial aid award at Kent ($39,100) covers 64% of the total COA of $62,150 (tuition, room, board & various fees). This seems generous to me.
Relative to its endowment, Kent is one of the most generous. I don’t know what Loomis’ endowment is but Taft and St. Mark’s can simply afford to award more not to mention that St. Marks is a much smaller school so even if the percent of students receiving aid is higher and the award per student is higher the number of students receiving aid at Kent is likely higher as is the overall amount devoted to FA. Kent offers nearly what Hotchkiss does and Hotchkiss’ endowment is nearly five times as large.
I am not angry, I would just like you, and others, to be precise - if the purpose of your thread is to be helpful to those families interested in need-based aid. I am familiar with the Partridge and other merit awards at Kent as my son was awarded two of them. These are given students whom Kent deems ineligible for need-based aid.
In order to be helpful to families and students who are interested in need-based aid, you should go back and look at @GMTplus7’s work. It usefully debunks a lot of myths about financial aid and its relationship to endowments, one of which is embedded in this tread - that the higher the endowment, the higher the FA. Generally true at 50,000 feet, not precisely true on the ground.
Parents interested in needs-based FA should simultaneously be encouraged to not simply look at high endowment schools and to go into the application process with eyes wide open. To do this, they need very good information.
Need-based aid families are a growing and underserved segment of the private school market. Good information is very hard to find; we should work hard to find it.
I do not know why you construe this as angry. Assertive and insistent yes, angry no.
Neither the title of this thread nor the opening post had anything to do with FA. The OP simply ranked endowment by size and by student and drew no helpful conclusions or posed any question. Someone later in the thread conflated endowment with FA, and the conversation has devolved from there.
For people needing FA, the size of the endowment is not the important metric. It’s the percentage of students who receive FA and the average award per student. For those needing full FA, the only important metric is percentage of students receiving full FA. Schools choose what to do with their endowments. A school with a huge endowment could decide not to allocate any of it to FA, and a school with a much smaller endowment could choose to use a large percentage of it for FA. As we’ve seen here over and over and over, schools with smaller endowments can be quite generous to a significant number of their students.
It’s easy enough to find GMT’s analysis, but I won’t post it because the data is not current. If you’re interested, you can gather the current data and do the analysis yourself.
@ChoatieMom. This post is most definitely about endowments and FA. It started with a simple list of schools ranked by endowment. Why this is of interest to anyone.is unclear to me. Like with colleges, endowment almost always correlates directly with institutional reputation. Most people on here know the highly ranked schools well.
No one conflated. @AppleNotFar in post 5 attempted, I believe, to make the thread useful asked about FA. Many others soon joined in, including you. And it did not devolve. It has wandered, for sure. And I’ve questioned the purpose of the thread. But it has largely been since post #5 about FA. Many have added insights, notably @RedSoxFan18. You do in your last post, “schools with smaller endowments can be quite generous to a significant number of their students.”
As to @GMTplus7’s work. It was extensive and yes it was a bit ago, however it is directionally correct and highly relevant. I think it should be added to this thread. I am not going to replicate @GMTplus7’s work.
If one is going to publish such lists and hold them forth as “fact”, in the future please site sources/time frame of the “data” posted. Andover’s looked low to me so a quick google search showed that as of the end of their fiscal year 2017, the endowment was actually $1.058 billion. I didn’t bother checking the rest for accuracy. Perhaps the data provided was for another fiscal year but one must compare apples to apples and provide transparency otherwise the data is meaningless, IMO, especially in years of high market returns.
The best source for looking at endowments is to look at a school’s IRS Form 990, Schedule D, Part V where it is all laid out for you. A school like SPS should be commended for their transparency and timeliness in posting their 990 on their website for all to see. That’s the model to be followed. Many other schools aren’t so forthcoming. https://www.sps.edu/page/about-sps/administration-and-governance
As an example of an outstanding boarding (50% boarding/50%day) school with a small endowment, the Thomas Jefferson School in St. Louis, Missouri consistently produces some of the highest SAT scores in the nation among high schools, yet has a paltry endowment of just one ($1,000,000) million dollars. Enrollment is about 88 students total for grades 7 through12. Thomas Jefferson School uses rolling admissions. The school was founded in 1946 and offers merit scholarships.
Another interesting school for those wanting a St. Paul’s School type humanities experience is the Asheville School in Asheville, North Carolina which has a healthy endowment of about $49 million as of a year or two ago. The school, founded in1900, is well over 100 years old.
The Asheville School is 80% boarding, has about 288 students, is co-ed and has a four year, team taught humanities program which combines literature, history, religion, art, music architecture, film & dance. The humanities program is divided into four year long courses titled Ancient Studies, World Studies, European Studies & American Studies. Science, math & foreign language courses are also offered. Those with SSAT scores in the 60 to 70 range are routinely admitted. The average SSAT score is 63.
I agree that this “thread” is discussing endowments and FA, but that is not what my first sentence in #69 said. The title and opening post said nothing about FA, it’s just the way the conversation has “wandered.”
If you look up the meaning of “conflate:”
Treating endowment size as related to or predictive of FA awards, IMO, is conflation as these are “two distinct concepts” that cannot be treated as one without producing “errors or misunderstandings” which is what some helpful posters are trying to point out.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
I still am missing the point of this thread. But since it’s become a free-for-all circular debate, which is against the rules, I am closing.
