How important is endowment size or per pupil endowment size in the college selection process? Is there a place/way to see how much money a given school spends on their undergraduates?
Context: my kid was accepted to diverse range of schools and I noted that some of SLAC per pupil endowment is much larger than that of more prestigious “brand name” schools.
Interested to hear your thoughts and see your links! Thanks.
It’s important in determining how much is available for scholarships.
Endowment is important insomuch as a school can’t give what a school ain’t got. The schools that guarantee to meet full need also tend to be the ones with godzilla-sized endowmnent per capita. They use the earnings on endowment to supplement the cost of operation the school, including the granting of FA.
Are there ways that the endowment impacts the quality of student life or is all about financial aid?
It seems important to Donald Trump :))
Sure. Schools with large per student endowments can do a lot of things in terms of facilities, lower teacher student ratios, events on campus, grants for summer internships or study abroad, perhaps provide more stuff without fees. And yes, scholarships.
The Chronicle’s ‘College Completion’ site has data on endowment and spending, plus median SAT, 4-yr & 6-yr graduation rates, average student aid, % Pell Grant, % FT Faculty, etc…lots of interesting data.
Search for a specific school, then scroll down to the Efficiency and In Context sections. You can also search by the data (create a table) by state, public vs private, size; sort your table by any column (avg aid? SAT?); compare to other schools in the same state, or to other similar schools; and make your own table of data for schools you are interested in.
With regard to endowments, I don’t think comparing public schools to private schools is very useful in most cases. But lots of interesting info nonetheless.
One other importance of endowment is that the larger the endowment, the more likely the school will continue to be competitive and excellent long into the future, and that matters if prestige is important to you–you wouldn’t want to go to a “good” school only to have its reputation erode over the course of your career.
(that said, rich schools are rich schools, and after a certain point, endowment probably doesn’t mean much to the individual student or alum)
Endowment, particularly per-student endowment, can be a rough indicator of another important factor, alumni satisfaction, since it is commonly generated over time through their contributions.
Yes to alumni satisfaction, but alumni success at wealth generation might be considered as another factor…