<p>The five richest liberal arts colleges have finally all weighed in with their June 2010 annual financial statements. In order, the per student endowments (based on 2009-10 commmon data set enrollments):</p>
<p>$950,472 Pomona College
$827,321 Swarthmore College
$793,710 Amherst College *
$730,767 Williams College
$728,025 Grinnell College</p>
<p>** if you reduce Amhersts endowment by the $100 million they borrowed for operating expenses/cash calls, their per student endowment would fall to $736,370. *</p>
<p>I’ll add some more as I get to them. Some schools publish such inscrutable financial reports that I have to wait for the annual NACUBO endowment survey to come out. You would think that an endowment figure would be pretty easy to get from an annual financial report, but it’s amazing how difficult it can be in some cases.</p>
<p>I should be able to get Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Vassar. I haven’t been having good luck with Wellesley, but I’ll look. I don’t generally follow Kenyon and Macalaster’s financials, so those would have to wait for NACUBO in January. You can poke around their websites for their annual reports and just divide the endowment by the Fall 2009 Common Data Set enrollment number.</p>
<p>It shows Wellesley at over $1.2 billion, but also shows Pomona at $1.3 billion, Swarthmore at $1.1 billion, Amherst at $1.3 billion, etc. I have a very hard time believing that endowments shrunk so much between 2009-2010 – I would have expected the previous year to have been the biggest hit, because the stock market pretty much bottomed out in the early months of 2009. So I’m thinking the document I posted is using a different methodology to calculate the figures – but it should be pretty good for measuring relative strength in any case.</p>
<p>(I’d note that the OP failed to cite a source for his figures in any case… mine come from a report by the National Association of College and University Business Officers and Commonfund Institute issued in 2010, and was found with about 20 seconds’ worth of internet research. Googled “Wellesley endowment”, took me to wikipedia, wikipedia had a footnote, the footnote pulled up the doc linked to above).</p>
<p>OK, that makes sense – you’d have to do the math to get the per student totals from my figures then. Wellesley has roughly 2200 students, so their number would translate to roughly $550K per student - or reversing the equation, Pomona has roughly 1500 students, so their per student number as cited by the OP would translate to around $1.4 billion.</p>
<p>Another difference between calmom’s numbers and interesteddad’s numbers is that calmom’s numbers are from FY 2009 (June 30 2009, mostly), and interesteddad is reporting FY 2010 numbers (which are generally higher across the board).</p>
<p>The source, as indicated, is the year-end June 30, 2010 audited Annual Financial Report, now posted by each of the five colleges. I am familiar with the NACUBO Endowment Survey, but that data is not released until the end of January.</p>
<p>sDon:</p>
<p>You have to find the annual reports at each college website, scavenger hunt style. Sometimes they are linked from the Finance Office or Controllers Office or Treasurers Office or Presidents Office or Institutional Research Office. Sometime you have to do a search for Financial Statement or Annual Report or Financial Report. The bigger endowment schools almost all post them. Some are more “readable” than others. The best ones have a “management” discussion, highlighting the key fianancial indicators: endowment, endowment return, operating expenses, endowment spending, debt, and so forth. Others, not so much.</p>
<p>Here are the links for these five schools. They are all in PDF format:</p>
<p>Yes, most schools saw signficant improvements in their endowments this year. In year to year change in endowment (investment return, plus gifts, minus endowment spending), the changes were:</p>
<p>Swarthmore 10.7%
Grinnell 9.8%
Pomona 8.5%
Williams 8.3%
Amherst 6.2%</p>
<ul>
<li>means the best number I can pull out of the financial statements. Don’t take this number to the bank. I prefer a simple explicit statement of investment return as provided in management discussion or President’s updates at Swarthmore, Williams, and Amherst.</li>
</ul>
<p>$950,472 Pomona College
$827,321 Swarthmore College
$793,710 Amherst College
$730,767 Williams College
$728,025 Grinnell College
$495,377 Bryn Mawr College
$440,143 Bowdoin College
$289,885 Vassar College
$289,396 Haverford College
$170,504 Wesleyan University</p>
<p>BTW, Vassar and Wesleyan have significant budget challenges. Their endowment spending for the year was 7.5% and 7.6% respectively. Those numbers are unsustainable. Colleges view anything above 5% to 5.5% as spending down the endowment. Look for serious cost-cutting and/or revenue increases at both schools. They have no choice. If I’m not mistaken, both are expanding enrollment, again, to generate revenue dollars.</p>
<p>Next highest among this group was Amherst at 5.6%. At the other end of the scale, Grinnell, Williams, and Swarthmore ended the year with endowment spending ranging from 3.8% to 4.1%, a function of getting a handle on the budget cutting early and the improvement in the markets in the months leading up to the start of the fiscal year. In other words, the year started with better endowment numbers than had been used in the budgeting projections. This makes Vassar’s and Wesleyan’s endowment spending even more eye-catching. </p>
<p>Most of these schools had an actual reduction in operating expenses over the prior year as the belt-tightening measures started to kick in.</p>
<p>BTW, Bryn Mawr had an excellent year, increasing it’s endowment (after gifts and spending) by 10.9%. I believe their investment return may have edged out Swarthmore, at 15%.</p>
<p>Given that Bryn Mawr has one of the top per student endowments in the country, and leverages its assets by sharing academic resources with Haverford, I would think it might be one of the best “admissions values” in the country. If I were helping a daughter put together a list, this would be a great addition. You would be hard pressed to find a school with this kind of financial resources relative to the difficulty of admissions. The weak demand for “women’s colleges” creates an opportunity for real value in admissions and a half a million dollar per student endowment is pretty rarified finanacial terroritory.</p>
<p>Fantastic location, breathtaking neighborhood, accessible by rail and cheap airfares, an essentially combined academic program with Haverford, the option of courses at Swarthmore and Penn, and a very strong academic reputation.</p>
<p>Somebody should do a “value index” with per student endowment divided by median SAT scores. Bryn Mawr would be near the top of that index.</p>
<p>At the suggestion of an above poster, I just looked at the annual financial statements of a couple universities. They are often in the “finance” section of a university’s administrative website. </p>
<p>It was interesting to see that these two university’sr long-term debt exceeded their endowments. One university also listed millions of dollars in interest rate swaps, which can be risky. </p>
<p>Debt is not necessarily bad - when it is used for a very long-term asset. However, it does put the college’s supposed riches into perspective.</p>
<p>There are some colleges (particularly Catholic colleges) that in past decades put all of their extra funds directly into construction projects on a “pay as you go basis.” Some of these colleges do not appear to have large endowments, but they also have little debt. </p>
<p>Ideally, any list of endowments also report some ratio that would factor in debt.</p>
<p>Here’s the list, per student endowments minus debt. I left the order the same, but highlighted Grinnell which would jump up to third among LACs if debt were subtracted:</p>
<p>$829,608 Pomona College
$710,108 Swarthmore College
$612,851 Amherst College
$608,779 Williams College $650,649 Grinnell College
$408,548 Bryn Mawr College
$360,148 Bowdoin College
$216,574 Vassar College
$193,335 Haverford College
$96,435 Wesleyan University</p>
<p>A college with more debt than endowment really doesn’t have an endowment, IMO.</p>
<p>Interesteddad, we have this discussion every year. Really. As you well know (not sure how you can miss it), Wesleyan calculates its endowment spending on a 12 quarter moving basis, standard practice among American institutions of higher learning. The purpose is to insulate budget decisions as much as prudently possible from the volatility of the marketplace by smoothing out the yearly cycles. On that basis, Wesleyan’s endowment spending is well within the 5.5% ballpark.</p>
<p>By comparison, Swarthmore does the same thing except backwards by counting chickens before they even hatch:
</p>
<p>Moreover, on a per capita basis, Wesleyan is somehow able to match Swarthmore dollar for dollar where it counts: instruction and research:</p>
<p>They can hide behind the moving average all they want, it doesn’t change the fact that they spent 7.6% of the endowment’s value at the beginning of the fiscal year. All colleges use a moving average calculation. The fiscally sound colleges all threw the moving average out the window when the market collapsed in 2008 and began implementing immediate cuts, stating explicitly that they couldn’t wait to make budget adjustments and that continuing to spend at the rate allowed by the moving average would result in far too much endowment spending. The only colleges I’ve seen who have continued to spend based on the moving average are colleges that couldn’t reduce their spending enough.</p>
<p>Are you telling me that Wesleyan is satisfied with their 7.6% spending rate and is not taking steps to reduce the budget? I don’t think so. That sounds like something Bard would say.</p>
<p>^^Of course, they’re calmly taking prudent steps to reduce the endowment “draw” over the long-term. But, they’re not letting it distract them from their main mission which is providing the best possible education to the most highly qualified student body any small university can find.</p>
<p>^^^^“Given that Bryn Mawr has one of the top per student endowments in the country, and leverages its assets by sharing academic resources with Haverford, I would think it might be one of the best “admissions values” in the country.”</p>
<p>Everything ID said about BMC is true - a real admissions value and an outstanding college. I just wish they were a little more generous with the FA given their endowment. Both Haverford and BMC meet need, but Haverford has a no loans policy that makes it a better “financial value”. This from direct experience comparing FA offers.</p>
<p>Actually, Bryn Mawr does more fiancial aid discounting than Haverford. The average Bryn Mawr student is getting a $19k discount versus a $14k discount at Haverford. The average Bryn Mawr student is paying $28,600 a year versus $35,900 per year at Haverford.</p>
<p>Haverford actually has one of the highest average prices paid (actual cash money) of all the LACs. Bowdoin is higher at $37,000. Wesleyan charges the most; its average student pays $37,600 cash money. Vasser is close at $34,200.</p>
<p>Swarthmore and Pomona are both at $32,000. Williams is at $29,500 (the diffference being that Williams gets essentially zero full pay internationals, so their international aid discounts are crazy high – they ended the need-blind to reduce that).</p>
<p>Grinnell is at the low end among this group at $22,600. They have traditionally pursued a lower cost, lower price strategy, to offset the lower demand for their location.</p>
<p>BTW, “no loan” is a policy aimed at middle and upper income brackets, not at the very high need brackets. It’s designed as an inducement to attract customers capable of writing sizeable (but not quite full-fare) checks each year. Most of the schools with “no loan” policies were already no-loan for low income, high need students. Adding the “no-loan” policy was extending the discount up to families in the $50,000 to $200,000 a year bracket.</p>