Just aggregating them for anyone interested in taking a look. These are the ones I have found so far.
1.Harvard $37.1 billion
2.Yale $27.2 billion
3.Stanford $24.8 billion
4.Princeton $23.8 billion
5.MIT $14.8 billion
6.Penn $12.2 billion
7.Columbia $10 billion
8.Duke $7.9 billion
9.Chicago $7.8 billion
10.Cornell $6.8 billion
11.Dartmouth $5 billion
12.Brown $3.5 billion
Think analyzing on a per student basis make most sense. When you do so and add in some of the top LAC’s you’ll see some interesting revelations.
@Chembiodad Per student is also important but it is too much work to do now, but total endowment is also important in many ways in terms of infrastructure, ability to make big capital expenditures, attract top faculty, research etc. Another important feature is the actual spending. Didnt find any new figures for the LACs.
The 2017 figures have just been announced for many schools. so I google searched each one and aggregated the ones I could find…Northwestern, Michigan, Rice, WUSTL, Hopkins have not announced theirs yet.
Forgot to look for Notre Dame, I just did, they are at $11.8 billion for 2017.
Actually, SOKA UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA has the highest endowment per student in the United States.
International95, Princeton has the highest endowment per student in the US, at roughly $2.7 million/students ($22 billion endowment shared by 8,200 students. Soka does come in at a very close #2, with an endowment per student of roughly $2.6 million/student ($1.1 billion shared by 430 students). It should be noted that Soka does not officially report its endowment, so it is not verified by a third party.
A 2003 DOE/National Center for Educatation Statistics Study focused on instructional spending at 4y colleges and universities. Many factors contribute to direct instructional costs. A key finding of this study was that “most of the variance in instructional cost across institutions, as measured by direct expense per student credit hour taught, is associated with the disciplinary mix within an institution.” A secondary factor is “institutional mission, as related to Carnegie institutional classification”. The study found for example that it cost $112 per credit hour to teach English at a “comprehensive university” but $379 per credit hour to teach mechanical engineering at a “research university”.
https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2003161
As far as I know, the public data available from the DOE/IPEDS does not break out salaries (or other components of instructional spending) by discipline.
“Here’s a question for people here: Would faculty average salaries by major be a better or worse stat? Does pay of professors correlate to teaching ability? If not this stat, exactly what part of endowment spending per student is significant for an academic experience?”
PengsPhils, I think it absolutely makes sense. A university where the majority of the faculty is affiliated with STEM departments and professional programs (Law and Business) will naturally have much higher average faculty salaries than a university where the majority of the faculty are affiliated with traditional discipline departments like the Humanities, Social Sciences and natural sciences.
Cost of living should also be factored in. Faculty in universities located in the Bay Area or NYC are obviously going to be paid a lot more than faculty at universities located in rural areas or areas with significantly lower costs of living.
My understanding is a lot of endowment income typically goes to financial aid, to lower student tuition costs.
State-supported institutions receive state funding, obviously, and already provide lower tuition in the first place, hence don’t need endowment for this function.
For example, Cornell is actually divided into The “Endowed Division” and the “Statutory Division”. The “statutory division” colleges receive funding from New York State. All its in-state students enrolled in the statutory colleges receive reduced tuition regardless of demonstrated need.
from a June 2008 article:
“The yearly check from Albany functions as a de facto endowment for the statutory colleges, funding professor salaries, student services, and research initiatives. Last year, Cornell received $175 MM in state support. That’s the functional equivalent of a $3.5 billion endowment.”
$3.5 billion divided by 20,000 students is additional $175,000 endowment equivalent per capita.
I’m sure these numbers have gone down since then, since state education funding is always under pressure.
Still “quasi-endowments” of this type should not be ignored, lest ye mislead.
“Thus true inter-institutional endowment comparisons which do not detail quasi-endowments represented by state funding initiatives as well as external research funding grossly misstate the comparability between institutions which may, or may not, be inherently non-comparable.”
List of colleges and universities in the United States by endowment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Actually, SOKA UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA has the highest endowment per student in the United States.”
Not clear to me that this is a legit university.
Also M2L University has a one dollar endowment and accepts no students, giving it an infinite endowment per student. Clearly that makes it better than all other schools.
Getting back to the title of this thread:
“University of Michigan endowment approaches $11 billion behind record giving”
http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2017/10/university_of_michigan_endowme_2.html
Approximately 10.8 billion of it belongs to the A2 campus
Both reported spending per student and endowment per student can be very misleading, particularly when looking at undergraduate education. Schools with hospitals and large research operations typically have much larger budgets. (Medical spending is 17% of GDP in the U.S. - there is virtually a medical-industrial complex.) As Alexandre pointed out, the medical side is often 50% or even significantly more of an institution’s budget. If you combined Berkeley with nearby UC San Francisco, it would make a huge difference in these financial that are cited for Berkeley, but would make NO actual difference in undergraduate education at Berkeley. It would just be an administrative accounting decision.
Statistics cited for education spending per student will include research. That can be really misleading as the impact on undergraduate is difficult to assess. JHU’s numbers likely includes the Applied Physics Laboratory which has 6K employees. But that lab is largely driven by Defense Department projects, is a fair distance from the undergraduate campus, and largely works with graduate students in a few areas.
With endowment spending, a lot of it is restricted, and it is often restricted to things like graduate schools and athletics. Again, hard to determine the impact on undergraduates without a lot of digging. Harvard has reported that 84% of its endowment is restricted. Harvard Business School’s endowment alone is nearly $4B, and it doesn’t have any undergraduates. This isn’t to say Harvard doesn’t have resources for undergraduates, I am just pointing out that really making sense of these finances is complex.
University of Michigan’s endowment grew by 14% and now stands at roughly $10.7 billion (just for the Ann Arbor campus).
**Moderator’s note: I have deleted many off-topic posts and moved the discussion of instructional spending to a separate thread.
Please keep discussion on this thread to announcements of 2017 endowment figures.**
U Michigan funds $433M of its $1.3B research budget out of “institution funds”
For comparison
U Wisconsin funds $344M of its $1.2B research budget out of “institution funds”
U Washington funds $74M of its $1.1B research budget out of “institution funds”
Using a 4% drawdown factor, it would take about $10.8B endowment just to provide those “institution funds” for research
Using a 5% drawdown factor, it would take about $8.7B endowment just to provide those “institution funds” for research
These days, 4% is the more prudent number.
http://www.bestcolleges.com/features/colleges-with-highest-research-and-development-expenditures/
@Mastadon, the source of institutional funds that support research is not usually specified. But given the size of institutional funding of research, it quite likely involves tuition and state appropriations. Institutions don’t want to expressly say that.
Hamilton College
Endowment and Similar Funds (June 30, 2017): $954.7 Million
Endowment Per Student: $489,600
Vanderbilt endowment climbs to $4.1billion. 11.5% investment return.
Other public universities with >$5B system-wide endowments include the University of Texas, Texas A&M, and University of California systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment
If you consider endowment assets per FTE enrollment for only the flagship schools, Michigan-AA pulls ahead of most other public universities (and also ahead of several of the USNWR T20 private universities).
$2,662,280 … Princeton University
$1,758,916 … Yale University
$1,509,997 … Harvard University
$684,408 … University of Notre Dame
$489,535 … WUSTL
$477,992 … Duke University
$427,090 … University of Pennsylvania
$353,091 … Vanderbilt University
$337,175 … Brown University
$252,630 … University of Virginia-Main Campus
$220,027 … University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
$211,910 … Cornell University
$175,369 … TAMU - College Station
$149,304 … Johns Hopkins University
$97,337 … Georgetown University
$72,524 … The University of Texas at Austin
$54,157 … University of California-Los Angeles
$46,307 … University of California-Berkeley
Among LACS,
Pomona, Swarthmore, Amherst, Grinnell, and Williams each have >$1M endowments per student.
Source: IPEDS (2015 data, the latest available)
Colgate: As of March 31, 2017, the market value of Colgate’s endowment investment portfolio was approximately $849 million.
Not certain why many LAC’s haven’t disclosed 2017 data yet given they all seem to have a June fiscal year.