<p>this makes me recall and question the statistic that though H has the largest endowment princeton has the largest endowment per student.</p>
<p>maybe if we had data for princeton we could calculate this and directly compare the endowment money per undergraduate student,</p>
<p>but some rough estimates.</p>
<p>H and princeton have about the same number of students though Princeton College is a bit smaller.</p>
<p>their endowments for the colleges and graduate schools combined are about the same 15.8 billion vs. 15 billion.</p>
<p>if someone had better data on students enrolled in the college vs graduate programs and a further breakdown on endowment money between college and graduate programs (here college and GSAS are grouped together) we could accurately calculate this.</p>
<p>preliminarily it looks like princeton might still be ahead per capita, but I think the difference is a lot smaller than what is commonly tossed around when you just divide the total endowment by total students in all schools - a method that is an unfair comparison because Harvard has a bunch of graduate and professional programs that princeton does not.</p>
<p>Not directly related to the original topic, but I came across yet another world university ranking based purely on objective criteria only. It's not the same as J-T University rankings which is sometimes criticized for counting Nobel Prizes and Field medals from decades ago (although it's only a small fraction of the total score and progressively less weight is given for older prizes).</p>
<p>This ranking system, called "2007 Performance ranking of scientific papers for world universities" uses:
research productivity (20%) - papers in past 11 years, papers in past year
research impact (30%) - citations in past 11 year and in last 2 years, average citations
research excellence (50%) - highly cited papers, articles in high impact journals, etc. </p>
<p>The rankings for Ivies/other elite schools are as follows:
1. Harvard
2. Johns Hopkins
4. Stanford
7. Berkeley
9. Columbia
10. MIT
11. Penn
14. Yale
16. Duke
18. Cornell
26. Chicago
48. Princeton</p>
<p>It obviously favors larger schools but does give you a reasonable sense of the overall scientific research capabilities of the universities. It is up to date, does not count prizes, and does not rely on subjective surveys.</p>
<p>Here the California schools seem to suffer because the surveys target the Europeans, Australians, etc. Stanford isn't even in the top ten although I think it should be in the top 5. Yale and Princeton get a big boost because they have a better reputation in those regions although based on research productivity (scientific research at least), they are most likely behind Stanford.</p>
<p>It is a reasonable look at the overall scale and impact of scientific research at universities. Since it focuses on published papers, as opposed to books, it excludes those fields, such as social sciences, in which much of the publishing is in book form.</p>
<p>It also appears to count the same thing multiple times: Citations over the last 2 years included in citations over 11 years. Including the H index then counts them again...</p>
<p>It is interesting that the only factor that is independent of size (H index) is still much higher at the larger institutions.</p>
<p>H vs P. Harvard has a considerably larger undergrad population than Princeton (~6600 vs 4000), so endowment per student is higher at Princeton.</p>
<p>From what I hear, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences endowment is much more than 1.0 billion now and is one of the fastest growing schools at Harvard.</p>