<p>Should I care what a colleges endowments are? Does it matter if one school has has significantly less than another?</p>
<p>Slightly less shouldn’t make much, if any, difference.</p>
<p>Big endowments often suggest that the school can be generous with aid by including fewer loans or no loans in aid packages. Notice that the schools with mega endowments are usually the “meet 100% of need without loans” schools.</p>
<p>Schools with smallish endowments often gap students or put big loans in their FA packages.</p>
<p>Not 100% either way…just kind of a guideline.</p>
<p>Johns Hopkins recently completed a $3.74 billion dollar capital campaign in 2008. (The largest completed capital campaign by any U.S. university in World history)</p>
<p>Among the top 15 research universities in America, Johns Hopkins (along with WUSTL) is ***not ***100% need blind.</p>
<p>So big endowments, doesn’t necessarily translate to need-blind admissions.</p>
<p>Just do your research…</p>
<p>I believe the short answer is “no”.
High endowments tend to go hand-in-hand with other indicators such as low admissions rates, low student:faculty ratios, good financial aid, high faculty salaries, etc. So you usually can pick out desirable schools without paying attention to endowments.</p>
<p>There are a few schools whose endowments are unusually high or low among peer schools. Penn, for example, has had a relatively low endowment per student compared to other Ivies. Grinnell has a very high eps compared to other LACs (and universities, too). These differences may have some implications that matter to you, but you have to look at each school closely to see if the money differences are showing up in aid policies, facilities, salaries, or something else.</p>
<p>Now and then, a school’s budget problems really get out of hand. This happened to Antioch College (which shut down) and to New College (which went from private college to part of the state system in Florida). I don’t know of particular schools now facing these situations, but it’s not unlikely that small private LACs will continue to decline in numbers.</p>
<p>Endowments are important and can have a large impact on a school’s ability to finance various activities, from new buildings to new academic programs to better/more comprehensive financial aid to providing more advisory/consulting services to undergrads. </p>
<p>While endowments definitely matter, comparing them is not simply a matter of looking at size and concluding that ABC University has sufficient wealth. You need to look at the school and try to figure out its institutional priorities. How the school spends its money is a very good clue. </p>
<p>My suggestions are the following:
- Look at the size first and compare to like institutions and then do a per capita comparison including undergrad and graduate students
- In looking at the graduate student populations at major research universities, understand that grad students often are the greater focus of the institution as this is where the research reputations are made. These populations are important to the school, but they can also be very expensive, sometimes costing as much as 5-10x that of undergrads.
- Look at the financial aid policies of the school and how it treats different classes of undergrad students (eg, IS, OOS, international).
- Look at the school’s advisory programs, including things like academic advising, job placement counseling, etc.<br>
- Don’t neglect state funding for publics. While this is a declining share of the revenues for most state Us and likely to get worse (and maybe far worse) over the next decade, it helps. </p>
<p>I think of 1 & 2 as the size measurements and 3 & 4 as the priority measurements. Some schools might look very impressive on measurements 1 & 2, but they don’t do nearly as good a job as you might expect on 3 & 4. Schools that do well on all measurements should be the most highly regarded for their endowment.</p>
<p>I was just wondering because three of the schools my son is looking at have such different amounts of endowment.
Elon U- 86 million
Allegheny College 157 million
Quinnipiac 278 million</p>
<p>Not sure how current your endowment numbers are, but new data is scheduled to be released in next 1-2 weeks that will provide comparisons as of 6/30/09 (most recent fiscal yearend). If you’re working with 6/08 data, it is very outdated and I would hold off making any comparisons/judgments.</p>
<p>Hawkette,</p>
<p>Thanks for putting that upcoming date. Will the publication be free/accessible online, or will one need to buy a subscription? I have read the online data for D’s school, but for a laywoman like myself it’s all Greek.</p>
<p>The organization that collects and publishes this data is called NACUBO (National Association of College and University Business Officers). Here is a link to their site:</p>
<p>[NACUBO</a> Home](<a href=“http://www.nacubo.org/]NACUBO”>http://www.nacubo.org/)</p>
<p>The endowment data is found in the Research section in the Public NES (National Endowment Study) tables. The latest available is for 6/30/08. They have historically published new numbers in January of the following year, so the 6/09 data release is imminent. </p>
<p>Take a look at the 2008 data and you will see that it is a comprehensive list including both Nat’l Unis and LACs. Unfortunately, they don’t provide the per capita comparisons, but someone will calculate it and post in the days following the NACUBO release.</p>
<p>Thanks, but my D’s school in=is a Master’s Uni. Will those be included?</p>
<p>This is interesting as a point of long term study and discussion, but for the OP I think the answer is that it shouldn’t matter at all. They are looking at a very short term situation, relatively speaking. Any new buildings, major new departments, and other investments that tend to come from endowments would only be completed towards the end of their college career even if the school started planning those things now, and it isn’t like that is even likely. The only exception I can think of is if a school’s endowment is so dangerously low that there would be a danger of significant cuts in faculty and services. Beyond that the difference to the student of an endowment of $100,000,000 and $1,000,000,000 is not meaningful. Sure, it might make a difference in their aid as a big picture issue, but the OP would only care about the aid they received as an individual. Would you not apply to a school because the endowment was less and they MIGHT not give you as much aid? No, you apply and see what you get.</p>
<p>I agree with the tenor of hawkette’s post #5. Take a look at a school’s overall performance on various issues important to the applicant, generally summarized as “is this a good fit”. If you are happy with a school on the factors of size, location, quality of the peer students, reputation for being responsive to students once they are matriculated, etc. etc. and you can afford to go without taking on mountains of debt, it is a good match. The endowment number only becomes important after that because they will forever be hitting you up for money.</p>
<p>Thanks for all your thoughts and information everyone! :)</p>
<p>For comparative purposes, you need to look at per student endowment: total endowment divided by total enrollment (both undergrad and grad).</p>
<p>IMO, per student endowment is the first indicator I would look at when trying to learn about a college. It is like a temporary “trust fund” for each student, with the income from the trust fund used to finance “extras”. For example, some colleges have a per student endowment or “trust fund” of nearly $1 million. So if you get into one of these schools, you get the benefit of that income for four years. For example, a school might charge an average of $32,000 (after financial aid) and spend $83,000 per student thanks to the endowment. That’s a pretty sweet deal. That attracts very high demand. And, that’s why the colleges at the top of the rankings are at the top of the rankings.</p>
<p>Within a narrow range, no big deal. If you see large differences in per student endowment at schools you are considering, I would stop and rethink the list. You wouldn’t want to go to a poor fit school based solely on per student endowment, but IMO, it should be a major consideration and the deciding factor when choosing between two schools you like equally.</p>
<p>One caveat: different categories of schools will have different endowment factors. For example, you can’t directly compare endowment at a public school with a private school. A school ranked 50th is not going to have the same per studnent endowment as a school ranked 5th. You have to use some common sense. You’ll start to see the trends right away if you include per student endowment in the data you collect for each school.</p>
<p>By Wikipedia’s current figures for endowment and population, and by my arithmetic:
Allegheny: ~$75,000/student
Quinnipiac: ~$29,000/student
Elon: ~$14,000/student</p>
<p>With all due respect to interesteddad, I think that you could never have heard of endowments and be as well off, since you will see the results by visiting the campus and asking questions about things that are important to you. I agree schools with large endowments usually have great facilities and “extras”, but not always. As he said, they “might” spend that endowment money in that way, or they might not. After all, these schools with multi-billion dollar endowments didn’t start providing no-loan programs for lower income families until Congress essentially threatened them. Anyway, my point is you want to see results, not numbers on a piece of paper. That is the best way to make a decision, IMO. After all, look at tk’s numbers there. Elon is the lowest, yet the school is extremely popular right now and nearly all the students I know there and read posts from seem extremely happy. It isn’t always about everything you can “buy”.</p>
<p>
How much of the fundings for graduate students come from endowment, compared to the amounts from research grants and teaching assistantships?</p>
<p>As I recall, most of my stipends came from research grants and teaching, as were all of the others in my lab. Perhaps it is different nowadays?</p>
<p>Holy Cross’s endowment is $660 million with just under 3,000 students (undergrad only). Yayyy for meeting 100% of need (need-blind too). I’ve heard they give excellent financial aid, as in not a lot of loans. </p>
<p>Now I just need to get in …</p>
<p>
graduate students tend to be a wash, financially speaking. You would have to take the research money they attract and calculate how much endowment would be necessary to produce an equal amount of income; figure 20x the income figure, just to assume a safe 5% rate of return; less, if you want to assume a higher risk of return.</p>
<p>Wesleyan is a bit of an anomaly in that it is a relatively tiny university of ~3,100, including graduate students; between 60-70 of them are pursuing doctoral degrees in the biological and physical sciences. According to The Washington Monthly, Wesleyan attracts over $8 million in NSF and NIH grants annually. That’s the equivalent of having an extra 25% more in endowment income (based on Wesleyan’s 6/30/09 figure of $33 million a year) or an extra $120 million in its endowment portfolio, all devoted to running its science program.</p>