<p>check out the endowments at the US News ranking chart for different colleges. </p>
<p>CMU: 1billion</p>
<p>while others are:</p>
<p>Brown：2.7billion</p>
<p>Rice 4.6billion</p>
<p>Georgetown： 1billion</p>
<p>Tufts 1.4billion</p>
<p>Wake Forest 1.2 billion</p>
<p>Even Swarthmore, a liberal arts college with much fewer students, has 1.4billion</p>
<p>It's ironic that Andrew Carnegie used to be the wealthiest guy in the United States.</p>
<p>My point is, CMU is research university and is famous for it’s respectable engineering and computer science program, and those things need tons of money to purchase high-tech equipment and lab material. So it’s kinda weird that CMU has less endowment money than some liberal arts college (plz dont take this personally)</p>
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<p>Your pleading is futile. We Carnegie Mellon alumni shall hunt you until the end of time.</p>
<p>Research is funded out of grants usually, not endowment.</p>
<p>With all the money they take from us, they better not be poor.</p>
<p>haha, I meant for those who attend liberal arts colleges, don’t take it personally that I thought big national universities should be richer than liberal colleges.</p>
<p>CMU is also a relatively young university compared to other top tiers like Harvard and Yale. It’s only -been- CMU since 1967! For being as highly ranked as we are, we don’t have a ton of graduates to donate insane amounts of money-- Most of the '67 graduates probably aren’t even retired yet.</p>
<p>Even compared to most LACs it’s young. Swarthmore’s been around since the 1860s. :)</p>
<p>completelykate, your point actually makes a lot sense. But don’t engineering programs and science research need tons of money to run? How would CMU deal with that?</p>
<p>Research projects are generally funded by either the government (who despite the deficit still gives us lots of money) or big corporations. Some of our facilities are also essentially donated by corporations/foundations like the Gates-Hillman Center.</p>
<p>i think its pretty amazing that CMU has that much money and is relelativly so young.</p>
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<p>Carnegie actually founded the Carnegie Institute of Technology as a way for his mill workers to get an education at night and better themselves, as well as a place for their children to get an inexpensive, but high quality education. Unfortunately CMU’s lost a bit of that vision with their rising tuition costs. :(</p>
<p>Like Anselmo said, we have a crapload of government funding. The Software Engineering Institute I used to work at up the street is entirely funded by the Department of Defense to develop elite warrior robots. (Not really.) The Robotics Institute also receives a ton in grants because it’s one of the top pioneers in the world. I would imagine that it’s the same way in other research departments at CMU.</p>