New Endowment Data is Out

College Search & Selection
21

<p>While interesting to look at, I think it's entirely inaccurate to look at total endowment and endowment per capita when considering the true impact these numbers have on students. Certainly they're starting points, but if the universities are not going to actually spend any of the money, or not spend it at a consistent rate each year, then it doesn't really get you anywhere. The other article listed on CC mentioned that Harvard and Yale were spending below 4% or something from their endowment, and yet still raising tuition. </p>

<p>So, if the data is out there to determine what % each university spent from its endowment, that would be a much better measure of the true impact of these vast sums of money.</p>

22

<p>
[quote]
According to this data from the UC Treasurer as of June 30, 2006:</p>

<p>Berkeley: $2,464,109,000
UCLA: $1,912,071,000</p>

<p><a href="http://www.ucop.edu/treasurer/foundation/foundation.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.ucop.edu/treasurer/foundation/foundation.pdf&lt;/a>

[/quote]
</p>

<p>According to the newest US News rankings, the endowments are:</p>

<p>Berkeley: $3.3b
UCLA: $2.9b</p>

<p>Also, you can't make easy judgments based on just endowment figures. A few reasons:</p>

<p>1) Some schools have medical schools, some don't. Med schools are very expensive to run and constitute a large portion of a university's endowment. If UCSF were to be considered Berkeley's med school, Berkeley's endowment would be $4.5b. I suspect UCLA's would be significantly lower if it didn't have a med school. Notice that other schools like UC Davis and UCSD have over $1b, and they too have med schools.</p>

<p>2) When calculating endowment per capita, you have to remember that publics receive substantial money from the government. So you'd take 5% of the endowment (perhaps more, I think publics tend to spend more of their endowment than do privates, though I could be wrong), and you'd add in the revenue the government gives them to spend. For example, Berkeley receives $400-500 million each year, which is directly spent on students.</p>

<p>2)</p>

23

<p>San Francisco Chronicle article on Stanford's and Berkeley's endowments:
<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/24/MNCLUJSHN.DTL%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/24/MNCLUJSHN.DTL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The article got Berkeley's endowment per student wrong at $23,900 per student...If Berkeley had a total of $837 million investment gain, then Berkeley's endowment for 2007 is ~$3.3 billion, like Kyledavid posted.
That would be ~$100k/student.</p>

24

<p>The article also miscalculated Stanford's endowment per student. Stanford now has nearly 20,000 students.</p>

<p>17.2b/19,782 = $869,477/student.</p>

<p>But even the whole "endowment per student" measurement doesn't work much, as schools a) don't spend nearly that much of their endowment, b) don't spend nearly that much on students, and c) don't spend that much money on all students.</p>

<p>That can be applied to Stanford. Stanford probably only spends about 4.4% of its endowment. So if you adjust for what they actually spend, it's much lower. But even then, much of that isn't directly on the students -- it might be for a new building that impacts the faculty more, etc. Lastly, I think we can all agree that Stanford spends substantially more on its grad students than its undergrad students (especially when you consider that it has 2 grad students for every undergrad student it has).</p>

<p>Much of the same can be said of schools such as Harvard, etc.</p>

<p>In my opinion, schools with insanely high endowments -- Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, maybe a few others -- should not have tax-exempt status, given their selectivity (i.e. their service to so few students). But that's just me.</p>

25

<p>Actually the Furman endowment in the 2007 data was 566mil</p>

26

<p>UCBChemGrad</p>

<p>I think your calculation is easily understood yet if there's more cash spent/student at Berkeley/UCLA than even Harvard, why do the privates I've been to look more well-maintained (esp the interior) or seem to have newer equipments than Berkeley/UCLA (e.g. the weights at Berkeley's weightroom look so 80s)? My supervior used to work at UCLA before coming to my company 3 years ago and she told me how the restroom at her floor would often run out of toilet paper. ;)</p>

27

<p>I think people should also consider gifts and funding campaigns. . UCSB shows an endowment around 152 million, but they have another 462 million that they have raised since the quit and public phase of their fundraising campaign that started in 2000</p>

28

<p>An article in the Wall Street Journal mentioned that Warren Buffett pioneered the new era of how colleges invest their endowments as a trustee of Grinnell, which I think explains Grinnell's high rank on the per-capita chart. A lot of the replies here are asking for an exhaustive list by uniform criteria, which seems hard to obtain. The point is also well taken that it is really how a college spends the cash that makes the biggest difference.</p>

29

<p>What wouldn't someone, if they had the choice, NOT want to go to a school in the top 15 of endowment per capita? This data is quite compelling and it appears that there are enormous benefits to students, especially at the more undergraduate focused schools. The differences between say Amherst at $1m and 183,000 is huge.</p>

<p>1 , $2,331,935 , Princeton
2 , $2,212,096 , Yale
3 , $2,070,846 , Harvard
4 , $1,139,742 , Pomona
5 , $1,038,883 , Grinnell
6 , $1,008,724 , Amherst
7 , $973,414 , MIT
8 , $971,181 , Swarthmore
9 , $923,404 , Williams
10 , $907,589 , Rice
11 , $891,684 , Cal Tech
12 , $867,677 , Stanford
13 , $714,653 , Wellesley
14 , $642,885 , Dartmouth
15 , $583,046 , U Chicago</p>

30

<p>The total UC system is $8B, with Cal holding $2.9B as of June 30-07 (The UC News center said the SF Gate paper is incorrect.)</p>

31

<p>The more I think about this, the more I think this is a BS set of statistics...especially the per capita figure.</p>

<p>BalletGirls' post really nailed it home for me.</p>

<p>People see these figures and make judgments without having a clue how endowments work. Yes, Princeton has about 7000 students and if they were to exhaust their 15 Billion dollars in one fell swoop it would mean 2 million dollars per student, and things would be amazing and so on and so forth. There'd be no question that going to a school with an endowment per capita that large would be AWESOME...</p>

<p>But that is absolutely NOT the way these things work. At least in my experience with being on the board of a non-profit trying to build up its endowment, we got spend 6% a year of your endowment, if that! I repeat SIX PERCENT. And since this was through a medical school of a university on the list above, I know that's how the rest of the school gets to use its endowment money as well. The idea of an endowment is to provide long term security. The amount of money you get to take out is supposed to be less than what the money can gain in a year. </p>

<p>So using Princeton as an example, let's see what their ACTUAL per capita spending MIGHT be (if they were capable of and actually spending the money - which as the article TheWatcher posted says they don't)</p>

<p>
[quote]
Some lawmakers have suggested requiring colleges to spend at least 5 percent of their endowments each year, as nonprofits are required to do.</p>

<p>Colleges have spent proportionately less of their endowment for each of the past four years and now spend 4.6 percent on average. Institutions with more than $1 billion spent 4.4 percent.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>So back to Princeton:</p>

<p>$15,787,200,000 * 0.06 = 947,232,000 - a sizeable amount for sure, nearly a Billion dollars, lots can be done.</p>

<p>947,232,000/ 6700 (the approximate student population at Princeton) = 143,520. </p>

<p>Again, a pretty sizable amount of cash, but considering the cost of attendance is over 47k...not nearly as impressive. That amount of money they MIGHT possibly spend on a student doesn't even cover 3 years tuition...and of course we have to consider that it's known that they aren't even withdrawing that 6%, plus they aren't spending everything directly on students and so on. It becomes pretty obvious that these stats here inaccurate, and really don't mean much at all. They're nice for schools to brag about and to use as a tool to mislead potential students, but they don't represent real actual student expenditures.</p>

32

<p>In the case of the universities, they do not exist solely to educate students. So what they could do with the money if that were their only mission is beside the point. Sort of like asking how much money an NFL could pay its linemen if it did not bother having backs and receivers. If it did that it would not be a football team. A research university that defined its mission as restricted to educating students would cease to be a research university.</p>

<p>Tuition is not rising at record rates. Not even close. Rates have risen much more rapidly in the past.</p>

<p>UCBChemEGrad, according to information they file with the feds, the Educational & General Expenditures per FTE student is</p>

<p>42,361 at Berkeley </p>

<p>and</p>

<p>116,551 at Harvard</p>

<p>The expenses per FTE do not track endowment per student that closely. Much of the spending comes from sources other than endowment. Places with large scientific research establishments have lots of spending funded by grants.</p>

33

<p>Has any endowment lost a significant chunk of its value, with all the market crashes, recession fears, financial meltdowns, etc?</p>

<p>I for one would love if Harvard woke up and found out it was worth all of $5 billion--but not at the expense of my own ghetto school going bankrupt! ;)</p>

34

<p>bigredmed,
I concur with some of your misgivings about the data. The measurement of endowment per capita is a blunt instrument and should serve as a starting point. But it is not BS as it really gives some sense of the amount of financial (and perhaps operating) flexibility an institution might have. There are many more questions that one needs to ask before making any conclusive judgments, but the per capita numbers do have some power. </p>

<p>As others have suggested, one needs to ask what types of students are being served and what research does the university perform and how are institutional monies used to support those activities. The per capita numbers are very real for the LACs, but much less so for the major publics and their large and expensive graduate programs (frequently technically focused). The per capita numbers don’t account for the different cost of undergraduate vs graduate students and clearly this would be a very different calculation for grad students in the technical fields vs the undergraduate students in the humanities. </p>

<p>I should also add that there is the question of institutional willingness to spend money in support of undergraduate students. Some colleges are well known for their proclivity to do this while others treat undergraduate much more shabbily than the grad students. This is part of what students should be evaluating as they make their college comparisons and try to get a sense of what they will experience as undergrads at a college. </p>

<p>ilovebagels,
No one knows the numbers yet, but it is highly likely that many of the endowments got hurt badly since 6/30/07. We won't know for a year and even then not really because the data that NACUBO reports includes monies from fundraising and monies spent by the institution.</p>

35

<p>According to this site University</a> of California, Berkeley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia UC Berkeley alone has 3.5 Billion US Dollars, that's as of August 15, 2007.</p>

<p>UC Berkeley: 3.5 Billion US Dollars
Undergraduates: 23,482
Postgraduates: 10,076</p>

<p>UCLA: 2.9 Billion US Dollars
Undergrad students: 25,432
postgraduates: 11, 179</p>

36

<p>According to the figures from US News, which I think are the most updated, the UC system has $12.5 billion in total.</p>

<p>Berkeley: $3.34b
UCLA: $2.9b
UCSD: $1.11b
UCD: $1.33b
UCSB: $.71b
UCI: $.86b
UCSC: $.5b
UCR: $.54b
UCSF: $1.2b (as of June 30, 2006, so it's probably much higher now)
(UCM's is negligible)</p>

<p>Total: $12.5b</p>

<p>I'm assuming it's more like $13b, given UCSF's newer figure. (Not sure why there's such a discrepancy in reported figures.)</p>

37

<p>^ So, where do you think did the 3.5 Billion for Berkeley come from? I know the wikipedia can't be trusted ALL the time but the writer must have some bases for coming up with the amount he posted. What do you think, Kyle?</p>

38

<p>I think the writer might have misinterpreted the data. Notice that it links to the US News page, which says $3.34b. Perhaps they're adding in something not apparent here, maybe from another source (such as the UC reports, etc.).</p>

39

<p>
[quote]
Has any endowment lost a significant chunk of its value, with all the market crashes, recession fears, financial meltdowns, etc?

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I don't know of any examples in the world of college endowments, but the endowment of Phillips Exeter Academy (boarding "prep" school in NH) shrank a lot in the 1980s because the trustees bet wrong about how to invest it. What goes up can go down. Exeter only recently became need-blind and meets-full-financial-need again, after years of being need-aware in admission because of its (relatively) puny endowment. Now Exeter is need-blind and offers great financial aid. </p>

<p>Phillips</a> Exeter Academy | Phillips Exeter Academy Is Free to Those With Need</p>

40

<p>
[quote]
I think your calculation is easily understood yet if there's more cash spent/student at Berkeley/UCLA than even Harvard, why do the privates I've been to look more well-maintained (esp the interior) or seem to have newer equipments than Berkeley/UCLA (e.g. the weights at Berkeley's weightroom look so 80s)? My supervior used to work at UCLA before coming to my company 3 years ago and she told me how the restroom at her floor would often run out of toilet paper.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Sam, the numbers were just operating budget, not capital budget. UC, I imagine, has a lot more overhead than privates.</p>