<p>No public school can compare with the ivies in the academic resources it has, the strength of its student body and its name cachet for job placement. The ivies are harder to get into and have the prestige. if you have a choice and have the qualifications you go to a top private in almost every case.</p>
<p>It's not like there's any universal state school experience. It may be fair enough to generalize about 8 schools in the northeast, but doesn't make much sense to talk about hundreds of schools across the country of drastically different sizes, locations, missions, and student bodies as if they represented a single experience, or even similar experiences.</p>
<p>"No public school can compare with the ivies in the academic resources it has..."</p>
<p>At least as of 2007, Michigan had a larger endowment than half the Ivy League and was about even with Columbia. Obviously Harvard, Princeton, and Yale are in a class of their own, but there's no real reason to put the rest of the the Ivy League way ahead of top public schools unless you're big into perceived prestige/elitism.</p>
<p>Michigan also has 5 times the undergrad student population of Columbia so on a per student basis its much poorer. Also Michigan is arguably one of the top 4 publics in the country so its not the best example.</p>
<p>The biggest difference in going to a top school is that top schools give you a much bigger insight into how to navigate into the most coveted and difficult to obtain career trajectories. This comes from other students, career services, and alumni help which tends to be much more relevant. They are better hooked into "the system", its much much harder to get lost.</p>
<p>Without a doubt the students from my high school who went to Ivies (and Duke, MIT, Stanford, Amherst, etc) have done better than the ones (equally smart) who went to one of our state schools - and much of that IMO has to do with the access and insignt into worlds that the guys who stayed in-state never became aware of. Also the top schools tend to nurture their students through better access to grants, thesis advising, graduate placement advising, etc.</p>
<p>First of all, Michigan is my state school, so I'd say it's a pretty relevant example for me. Second of all, why is endowment per student more relevant (other than being one of many ways to skew rankings towards small selective schools)? Lots of things that endowment money can go towards isn't really affected by the size of the student body. Say Michigan has 5 times as many students as whatever school you're comparing it to. Does Michigan's library really need to have 5 times as many books to be comparable? Does every building on campus need to cost 5 times as much and be 5 times as large to be comparable? Would the physics department need 5 times as many particle accelerators to be comparable? Would we need 5 Nobel Prize winners for every one they had to be comparable?</p>
<p>slipper, since when is endowment per student measured purely on the basis of undergraduate students? Columbia (who's endowment of $7.15 billion is now actually slightly smaller than Michigan's endowment of $7.6 billion) has close to 20,000 graduate students and 25,000 students total. I'd say its endowment per student should include all students and not merely undergraduate students. Penn and Cornell have 20,000 students each and their endowments stand at $6 billion each.</p>
<p>Half the Ivies (Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Penn) do not have a significant advantage over Michigan or UVa where endowment or endowment per student is concerned. </p>
<p>And as dilsky aptly points out, most of the ways in which a university's endowment is used does not depend much on the size of the student body.</p>
<p>As for your other claims, I am not sure they can be proven one way or ther other.</p>
<p>The endowment per capita (undergrad and grad) numbers for the USNWR Top 30 National Universities are below. </p>
<p>$ 2,331,935 , Princeton
$ 2,212,096 , Yale
$ 2,070,846 , Harvard
$ 973,414 , MIT
$ 907,589 , Rice
$ 891,684 , Caltech
$ 867,677 , Stanford
$ 642,885 , Dartmouth
$ 583,046 , U Chicago
$ 544,297 , Notre Dame
$ 518,529 , Emory
$ 506,017 , Duke
$ 460,114 , Wash U
$ 407,041 , Northwestern
$ 340,159 , Brown
$ 310,861 , Columbia
$ 295,580 , U Penn
$ 294,378 , Vanderbilt
$ 273,976 , Cornell
$ 218,113 , Wake Forest
$ 182,145 , Tufts
$ 180,163 , U Virginia
$ 172,746 , U Michigan
$ 147,388 , Johns Hopkins
$ 121,101 , USC
$ 110,251 , Carnegie Mellon
$ 101,612 , UC Berkeley
$ 93,392 , Georgetown
$ 85,288 , U North Carolina
$ 77,383 , UCLA</p>
<p>These numbers may overstate the endowment for many schools that have large graduate student populations which typically cost far more to support. Below are the schools with the largest numbers of graduate students. I have also included whether these colleges have been recognized for classroom teaching excellence. Notice that most of the schools with large graduate student populations have NOT been recognized for this.</p>
<h1>of grad students , Recognized for their commitment to classroom teaching excellence , College</h1>
<p>17024 , No , USC
15831 , Yes , Harvard
15370 , No , Columbia
14959 , No , U Michigan
14032 , No , Johns Hopkins
13198 , Yes , Stanford
12103 , No , U Penn
11548 , No , UCLA
10508 , Yes , U North Carolina
10304 , No , UC Berkeley
9744 , Yes , Northwestern
9612 , Yes , U Chicago
9179 , Yes , U Virginia
7788 , Yes , Georgetown
7204 , Yes , Duke
6290 , No , Cornell
6143 , Yes , Yale
6129 , Yes , Wash U
6048 , No , MIT
5851 , Yes , Emory
5315 , Yes , Vanderbilt
4723 , Yes , Tufts
4644 , No , Carnegie Mellon
3362 , Yes , Notre Dame
2416 , Yes , Princeton
2376 , Yes , Wake Forest
2159 , Yes , Brown
2144 , Yes , Rice
1685 , Yes , Dartmouth
1220 , Yes , Caltech</p>
<p>personally im less concerned with endowment and more concerned with how each type of school will affect my future/college experience. right now, assuming i can get in, i have to compare UNC (oos) to brown/penn/dartmouth. at this point, my finances would look somewhat like 120k total for an ivy vs. 50k for UNC (only because their oos tuition is still under 30k per year) (the numbers are low because i have a tuition benefit from where my dad works)</p>
<p>I have personal experience with both private and public institutions. I attended a top-ten LAC, transferred to a top-ten state university, and did graduate work at both an Ivy and another top private university. To me, without question, the primary difference between the public and the privates was the nature of the student body. At the public, many students were there to get a degree, or live away from home, or to pursue other goals largely unrelated to academics. At the privates, the students were more uniformly able and ambitious. I learned much more from my peers in the privates than I did at the private. On the other hand, the quality of the teachers, when I selected well or got lucky at the public, was indistinguishable between the two. I believe the quality of the student body, however, matters as much as the professors, and I'm sending both of my children to (expensive) private schools.</p>
<p>The endowment per student at Cornell is about $400,000 per student. The New York State statutory colleges at Cornell are not endowed. You should divide the endowment by the number of students in the endowed colleges.</p>
<p>^But, the endowment does go towards the budget of general university expenses (like sports, entertainment, etc. etc.).</p>
<p>Maybe we should enact a 3/5ths compromise?</p>
<p>lol... bad joke.</p>
<p>A couple of thoughts.</p>
<p>To me, the original question isn't phrased correctly. Better might be what is the difference between the Ivy's and the top-ranked state universities. In terms of OVERALL quality (faculty, students, resources), the gap between the Ivy's and these publics will be far less significant than between the Ivy's and middle or bottom ranked state universities.</p>
<p>Dividing endowment by total students if fun, interesting, and probably says something, but I'm not sure what. Harvard does not spend over $2,000,000 per year per student, but will spend a certain percent of the income from the endowment to help support the total (not just education) university budget. Plus, a school that plows a significant percent of that income back into the endowment is one thing; a school like Berea College in Kentucky, with an endowment of about $1 billion (or was), that uses almost every cent of the endowment's income to help provide full tuition scholarships for each student is another. If a school has a large graduate population (and I think 65% of the total number of students at Harvard are in grad/professional schools) these figures probably say even less for an undergraduate. Hawkette probably has all these figures in a spreadsheet somewhere. :)</p>
<p>The quality of the faculty and resources at Ivy's and top-ranked state universities may be roughly equivilent, but as many others have mentioned, to me the biggest difference will be in the quality of the <strong>overall</strong> student body. Even at top-ranked state universities there will be a significant number of unmotivated and indifferent students. I attended a Mid-Atlantic state school many years ago, and feel I received a good education that has served me well in life. However, I remember as a freshman and sophomore student many large lectures, with smaller discussion groups led by TA's of widely varying quality, of TA lab assistants who never seemed to be around when help was needed, and classes where when the professor asked a question, you could hear crickets chirping in the room.</p>