<p>On wealth...
Dividing the Endowment Market Value in the NACUBO survey as of June 30, 2006, by the total number of graduate and undergraduate students in the Newsweek-Kaplan 2007 issue, you get endowment per student of-</p>
<p>Princeton $1,933,151
Yale $1,578,309
Harvard $1,494.043
MIT $ 824,115</p>
<p>Those are the top 4, excluding Olin (Northeast, obviously)</p>
<p>Some non-Northeast schools-</p>
<p>Notre Dame $ 389,109
Emory $ 404,318
Northwestern $ 305,030
U of Chicago $ 345,349
WashU $ 387,617
Duke $ 321,013
Vanderbilt $ 259,046</p>
<p>Stanford, Cal Tech and Rice are in the $700Ks.</p>
<p>Given the markets, I'm sure Princeton's endowment per student is now well over $ 2,000,000.
Given a target payout of say 4.5%, Princeton needs to take out about $90,000 per year per student. Add in about $15,000 per student in the annual drive, and you have over $100,000 per student that MUST be spent, even assuming no other income. There is plenty of other income in research dollars and student fees.
Top, wealthy LACs like Swarthmore spend about $80,000 per student TOTAL!
HYP can spend unprecedented amounts on cherry picking professors, financial aid, etc., etc. I'm not saying that all of this spending will appeal to all students, or is even worthwhile. I'm just saying that it is a competitive advantage that isn't going to disappear.</p>