<p>Anyone know of a link that references the relative endowment $ at LACs. I'm assuming that there is not a direct correlation with endowment $ and merit aid, but not sure. Anyone know?</p>
<p>I remember seeing an amherst video early; the endowment is about a billion, half the kids get aid, and the average aid package was about 20k (40k for the tuition)</p>
<p>Generally speaking, among the LACs the higher the endowment the LESS offered in merit aid. As I remember, of the LACs with the highest endowments (around a billion or more) - Williams, Swarthmore, Pomona, Amherst, Wellesley, and Smith - only Smith offers ANY merit aid, and not a lot of it..</p>
<p>Here are the 2003 numbers; the 2004 numbers will be available in January 2005. </p>
<p>The LAC with the largest endowment in 2003 was Grinnell $1,111,165.</p>
<p>Go to ivy league school, way better endowments.</p>
<p>Ivies don't use their endowment for merit aid. In financial aid, they use it for need based.</p>
<p>One thing I've learned from Interesteddad - It's not necessarily the SIZE of the endowment you should look at, but, rather, at the per student endowment. For universities, you must include graduate students in this number. Thus, a school like Grinnell with an $1,111.165 endowment but 1300 students may actually have more resources to devote to undergrad programs/education than a large university with more money.</p>
<p>To piggy back on what Carolyn wrote the bread and butter at a lot of large universities is research which is usually done at the graduate level leaing more money fro these students than undergrads, because the grad students in turn generate $ for the school</p>
<p>"Ivies don't use their endowment for merit aid. In financial aid, they use it for need based."</p>
<p>This is actually a bone of contention, both within the Ivies and the top LACs that claim they only offer "need-based aid". The truth is that they ALL have merit aid, within their need-based awards: they just don't like to admit it, unless forced to, as they were within the federal lawsuit of some year's back.. The federal lawsuit against the Ivies, settled about 5 years ago, was against the Ivies' attempt to regularize the shape of financial aid packages (size of package, and the size of grants, loans, work-studies, summer expectations within the packages) so that they wouldn't be competing with each other ("needbased programs competing you say? that would seem to be a contradiction in terms!") As a result of the settlement, they are back to competing against each other again in order to attract candidates that might otherwise go to the competition. Two candidates with the same "need" will not necessarily get the same package (and I can say this with firsthand certainty, as the father of a d. for whom "need-based" LACs were competing) -- the packages may vary very, very signficantly in their grant/loan components - in our case, as much as a full year's cost. And in April, all EFC calculations go out the window when a LAC or Ivy really wants a candidate - you tell them what the competition was offering, and they will often endeavor to match, totally independent of any need computation.</p>
<p>Spending per undergraduate student tends to be much higher at the better LACs than at the Ivies for two main reasons: the costs of maintaining and operating the physical plants are spread across a much smaller student base; and, secondarily, it is cheaper to have larger classes and pay TAs.</p>
<p>But even among the LACs, financial aid per student admitted varies quite widely, with that at Mount Holyoke being almost double what it is at Bates, and almost triple that at Davidson. Certain schools - notably Occidental, Amherst, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Macalester - spend very heavily in the financial aid department for Pell Grant students; others do not. Once you get to a certain size, per student endowment is NOT a critical issue (after all, the endowment isn't being spent, and spending per student at, say Mount Holyoke, is roughly the same as it is at Grinnell, even though it has an endowment less than half the size); per student financial assistance is a critical issue, because it affects the diversity of the student body, and the kinds and quality of academic discussion that occurs across economic class lines.</p>
<p>Then there is merit aid that is masked as needbased aid. (Macalester has a reputation for this, though I don't know if it is deserved.) They will give lots of small "needbased: financial aid awards to students who, with the same EFCs, don't qualify for aid at competing schools. The idea is to see whether this will, in fact, improve yield.</p>