<p>First, Williams does not have an undergraduate business school. So what? By your logic, you are more likely to end up with a plum ibanking or consulting job (which, by the way, I recommend against in any event, but that is an entirely different discussion) if you go to, say, Bentley, than if you choose Williams. Yet no one would ever tell you to do so. Williams grads are represented throughout the ranks of Wall Street, and that is well known, so obviously, not having an undergrad business school is no disadvantage. (And by the way, I love how you keep moving the goalposts, half the time, Cornell is unfairly disadvantaged because its various professional schools get taken into consideration by various rankings, but in the very same breadth, you try to argue, still with no proof, that Williams is somehow inferior to Cornell in placement only because it does not offer professional degrees. At the very least, pick one, and stick with it, either compare apples to apples and stick with Cornell’s A&S, or consider the entire undergrad student body). </p>
<p>Second, to ignore endowment and act as if its irrelevant is simply silly. It’s one of the few objective measures schools can be compared by. And it’s flat out false to claim that endowment is not spent on undergrads. Williams, like most schools (in Williams’ case, it’s around five percent) spends a certain amount from its endowment per year on undergrads. Thus, Williams ends up spending far more per year per undergraduate student than Cornell. While not a one-to-one correlation in quality, that directly translates into smaller classes, more access to full professors, more money for research, funding, and grants for undergraduates, better facilities on a per-student basis, and on and on. It’s one of the few objective measures we have to compare colleges and universities, and it is of course no accident that highest per-student endowment is closely correlated with almost every other measure of prestige, competitiveness in terms of admissions, success of graduates, and the like. </p>
<p>I’m sorry, but your comment that “you pay to enroll in college, not the other way around” shows that you really don’t understand how American colleges work, because even for full-pay students, tuition doesn’t come close to covering a college’s expenditures on you. And for a large portion of the Williams campus – remember 54 percent of Williams students are on financial aid, and the average package is something north of 40k per year – that statement is just laughably wrong. Williams spends well over 80,000 per year, per student to educate its students. Tuition, even for the fewer-than-half of campus who do not receive substantial financial aid, is tens of thousands less than that. The difference comes, in large part, from the endowment. Believe me, it matters. </p>
<p>By the way, while I do think Cornell’s tech campus is an awesome idea, considering that it, you know, does not yet exist, I don’t think that should factor into a prospective’s decision for the next four years. But I love the model and I think more cities should emulate it going forward, especially a place like, say, Detroit, which could badly use an infusion of human capital.</p>