<p>Endowment figures feed the “financial Resources” ranking used by US News. A school’s financial resources will go down if it has a lower endowment. The correlation is almost exact. And yes my entire point and your entire point is that a higher rating comes from stockpiling more money. It’s lot like the nuclear megatonnage rankings you see for countries. </p>
<p>The endowment figures also impact the peer rankings portion too since the higher education set tends to value the endowment standings as an important thing. To go back to my analogy here, Countries tend to rate other counties with a high nuclear tonnage rating higher as well. Note , the USA has the highest nuclear tonnage in the world even though its economy is a joke which is financed by many countries with no nuclear bombs like Japan and Germany.</p>