Oh @Chrchill - ever the contrarian - you know I didn’t simply mean lump size of wealth. Let’s go by wealth per capita. Then what does the landscape look like?
Also, why is it so impressive that a school that, until recently in institutional terms, had per capita wealth that was top 5 in the nation, also had top flight departments?
The thing that separates Chicago from SO many other places is it used to have big dog resources. That’s what made it a big time player for so long.
It’s maybe worth noting that the difference between top university endowments has ballooned in recent years. Twenty years ago, Yale’s endowment had just hit $5 billion, and Chicago’s was at $2 billion. The top 120 colleges and universities had a total endowment of about $120 billion, so Yale was around 4% of the total, and Chicago 1.7%. That was already a decade into vast expansion – Yale had only hit $1 billion for the first time in 1986. By 2016, the top 120 schools had total endowments of about $500 million, Yale was at $25 billion (5%) and Chicago was at $7 billion (1.4%). That was a big relative change, and it was over just the past generation. (I suspect the relative change would be even greater if I could find Chicago data from 30 years ago, when lots of current CC parents were graduating from college.) The top endowments today are vastly greater than the top endowments a generation ago, and the difference between them and the next tier, and between them and the average for the top 120, has soared.
Chicago has fallen behind the lead group, and relatively recently. The full effects of that have not shown up yet.
To some extent, there’s a timing difference. Chicago is late to its capital campaign, and there are 6-7 colleges above it on the endowment list that have recently completed ambitious capital campaigns. But that’s a pretty small element of the difference. It means that Chicago should catch up to Penn and Columbia eventually, but will still be lagging its strongest peers by a wide margin.
Everyone on this forum agrees that Harvard and Stanford are the top dogs by a huge margin. U of C may be in the second tier after that or the third tier. I have zero interest in debating that classification. This is my point in post #162. The final ranking is all in the eyes of the beholders. Or in U of C economics term: your utility function is drawn differently from mine ;).
What I would like to point out that U of C has always been famous for being a theoretical school. I am NOT saying a bigger endowment is not an asset or theoretical studies are better than empirical research. Still a school heavily concentrated in theoretical work may use less financial resources than a school deeply involved in experimentation. I am going to use two local Chicago Nobel Prize physicists as illustrations.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar won his Nobel Prize in 1982 “for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars”. Lederman got his Nobel in 1988 “for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino”. Chandra got his Nobel on highly theoretical work. Probably the only things he needed were a notepad and a pen to work on his groundbreaking Chandrasekhar limit. . On the other hand, Lederman was head of Fermilab for years. Lederman needed the Fermilab to help him to do his breakthrough research. Fermilab current budget is around $350 million. It is undoubtedly more expensive to have empirical/experimental research to achieve breakthrough than theoreticians.
Obviously, we need both strong theoreticians as well as empirical/experimental researcher together to make huge strides in human knowledge. Again, I am not belittling the power of a huge endowment. Still isn’t it true for a traditionally theoretical school like U of C,a less than top 5 endowment doesn’t automatically translate into a fatal flaw? U of C can be a top notch school without having a top notch endowment.
It really depends on what you actually care about. Of you care about the college, law school or business school you are as happy as a pig in spandex. If you care about med you are dejected.
In fact here is a question. Yale has an endowment that is mutiples of UChicago. Yet – Yale is in certain areas materially inferior to Uchicago (e.g, business) and in certain areas superior. In most areas the two are clearly comparable. The much larger Yale endowment has not resulted in a corresponding advantage over Chicago. Yale is lagging glaringly in natural sciences with all this extra money. So, while endowment is important. It is not dispositive. It make be that after a certain number of billions, their incremental utility declines.
My point was that the vast endowment difference is in fact relatively recent. Thirty or forty years ago, which is really only a generation in the life of a university, no one had super-huge endowments, measured in constant dollars. Harvard and Yale had larger endowments than Chicago then, too, but the range was compressed, and the absolute figure much less important. The huge difference in endowments is something that happened roughly 1985-2007, followed by a recession that caused most institutions to pull their horns in. So whatever the situation we see today, it doesn’t fully reflect the effect of the vast endowment differences we see today. It will take another 20 years to understand what it means.
Chicago identified this issue 15 years ago (or more), and has been working at it long term. The justification for many changes to the college has been to induce better support from wealthier alumni over time, and they are probably only barely testing the effect of that now. One hopes that in 20 years they will look back and see that they have achieved the kind of giving rate and yield that HYP have. The decision to borrow at ultra-cheap rates to redevelop much of the campus first, and raise money second, seems to have been a good risk. Provided they can raised the money. (Don’t expect the loans to be paid down in any hurry. Chicago’s expected rate of return on investments far exceeds the interest they are paying on those loans.)
Many of you forget how much can change in a few decades. This thread is full of Stanford this and Stanford that, but 30 years ago Stanford was not clearly in Harvard’s or Yale’s class as an overall university at all, and its college was a clear step down. It had a terrible situation where it had to repay hundreds of millions to the federal government, plus interest and penalties, and there was real doubt that it could maintain the level of excellence it had achieved. A lot is going to happen in the next 30 years, too.
@JHS Not at all true re Stanford. You have to go back to the 50’ and 60"s for Stanford not to be on the top class…
Agree with JHS re Stanford. Graduated from HS In CA in the 1970s. Stanford wasn’t competitive with HYP for top undergrads at that point. And, within the state, it occupied a position more like USC – i.e. the expensive private option for kids that couldn’t get into the best school in the area (Berkeley or UCLA).
I was there 1978-1981; my sister was an undergraduate there 1976-1980. It was a marvelous university, but the undergraduate program was very inconsistent. I would say there was universal recognition there that it was not on a par with its East Coast peers, although a motivated student could clearly do very well there. There was also still quite a lot of hangover from the internal political divisions of the late '60s and early '70s, much more than was the case elsewhere except maybe Columbia. Its professional schools and many PhD programs were very well regarded, and its engineering program was clearly top-shelf, but engineering in general was accorded less importance than today.
While it was perfectly clear that the university’s real estate holdings had huge value, its endowment was not on a par with Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Silicon Valley as we know it today was just getting underway – except for Hewlett-Packard, the big industry was still defense contracting. Everyone was talking about Apple, but there was no Stanford connection there. University intellectual property licensing, a huge deal today, was in its infancy.
Stanford then was at the doorstep, no question, but it was still somewhat the university of the future, not the clear world #1 or #2 it is today.
University of Chicago Medicine one page power announcement in Wall Street Journal today seems to suggest they are on it …
u of chicago is clearly a school on the rise. more applications, greater recognition… and an illustrious history. frankly schools like Yale and Princeton in my estimation are schools that are either holding steady or on the decline compared to the MIT and Stanford’s of the world.
and yes I do knock Harvard for having a mediocre engineering engineering program… these days if you don’t have top engineering in my book you’re not in the upper echelon of universities. perhaps last century… certainly not this one.
@Chrchill - as alluded to by @JHS, the financial situation of UChicago looks less stable and more risky than Yale’s, because it appears that UChicago has chosen to borrow a lot of money and spend freely in the hope that they’ll be able to put things on a firmer footing later.
To put numbers around it, as of the last published financial statements UChicago had about $4.5 billion of net debt against $7.4 billion of net assets, while Yale had $3.3 billion of net debt against $26.5 billion of net assets. This is why UChicago had to borrow to redevelop its campus while Yale could fund the ~$500 million construction of two new residential colleges and expand enrollment by 15% with one very large donation and out of its own resources.
While the value of facilities at the two schools is similar, were UChicago not able to rely on a much larger amount of hospital revenues than Yale, it would have to shrink. Yale’s endowment, supported by top long-term investment performance, is around four times the size of UChicago’s, enabling Yale to support operating revenues with a conservative endowment payout while UChicago is spending from their endowment at a higher rate and with a lower investment return.
If continued, this is unlikely to be sustainable and one would expect the differences in financial strength at the two schools to become increasingly apparent over time; it’s probably why UChicago is making a concerted effort to increase its number of full-paying students via an unprecedented use of early decision while Yale is increasing the number of first-gens and improving its financial aid. I can’t be sure it’s an apples-to-apples comparison, but student aid is ~49% of gross tuition and fees at UChicago, while tuition discount plus stipends and fellowships is 61% of gross tuition, room and board at Yale.
The financial statements are here:
http://finserv.uchicago.edu/sites/finserv.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/Documents/pdf/F_551669_RESTRICTED_16_UniversityofChicago_FS.pdf
https://your.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2015-2016-yale-financial-report.pdf
And I’ll also agree with @JHS and @exacademic - 30 years ago Stanford was not generally grouped with HYP (not at the undergraduate level, anyway). Back then I think it would have been the rare non-West Coast kid who would have chosen S if admitted to any of HYP. A lot can change in a relatively short period, though, as we’ve seen.
@CU123 nothing like stirring the pot lol…aint taking the bait though 
@DeepBlue86 My perception has been that 30 years ago Stanford was more or less equivalent to YP, a couple notches behind Harvard. Stanford’s rise in the past 10-15 years has enabled it to surpass YP, and placed it on par with Harvard in terms of it school status, desirability, selectivity, domestic/international reputation etc. Stanford’s rise however was very organic and aided by external factors (tech, silicon valley boom). This would be very hard to replicate. Also Stanford was already a top 4-5 university to begin with. Getting into that top 5 group is the hardest imo. It will take a lot for any other school to legitimately overtake any one of HYPSM and establish itself as a bona fide and widely recognized top 5 school.
@Penn95 - I’m afraid you’ve taken the other bait you so often take, when someone mentions Stanford without giving it (in your view) sufficient respect. 
In fact, I mentioned Stanford to compliment it - in this UChicago thread - on how far it’s come in the past 30 years.
That said, I can’t think of any college-age person I knew 30 years ago (and I knew hundreds, albeit mostly on the East Coast) who thought Stanford, fine as it was, was equivalent to any of HYP at the undergraduate level. I don’t recall knowing anyone back then who turned down one of HYP for Stanford - I’m sure there must have been some (probably with ties to California), but I can’t remember any - and I knew plenty of people at HYP who turned down Stanford or didn’t apply. Not that it wasn’t a great school - it was just seen as a notch below HYP, and far away. Maybe if you were college-age in the 80s you had a different impression; @JHS was actually at Stanford at the time (see post #208), and has provided some facts.
@DeepBlue86 - I must take issue with you. I was a Stanford undergraduate from 1971-1974 and I turned down Princeton, Penn, Dartmouth and Amherst. While very few of my classmates turned down Harvard for Stanford, it was not uncommon to see Stanford students who had been admitted to Yale or Princeton. This was particularly true of folks from the West but there were several classmates of mine from the Midwest, Texas and the upper South who said no to Y or P. @exacademic I knew a lot so students who felt Berkeley was on par with Stanford at the graduate level but not at the undergraduate level. That was not true of UCLA which was considered several tiers behind. When I got my second graduate degree at the U of C, a classmate’s parent from Brooklyn told my father Stanford was a no name college unlike Cornell which his son graduated from. I think many of the perceptions were geographical and the Ivy obsession was mainly a Northeaster phenomena
FWIW, I was specifically talking about Californian HSers (who had access to dirt cheap in-state tuition at that point) and was saying (or trying to say!) that the Berkeley vs. Stanford decision was analogous to UCLA vs. USC. (I wasn’t comparing Stanford and UCLA). Basically, among the HS students I knew (l lived in a college town and competed in a statewide activity that meant I had friends at lots of other HSs), HYP were seen as worth the extra $ for undergrad – Stanford was not. My HS routinely sent kids to Stanford, but they were never the top students academically. Typically, they were well-rounded kids who were pretty good at everything and not exceptionally good at anything.
It’s funny – I’d have said Stanford was more competitive at the grad level than the undergrad level, but that’s field-specific and a little bit later (early 1980s).
lot’s of heuristics and rationalizations on this board… based on an N of 1.
from an admissions standpoint Stanford was as selective 30 years ago… as it is now.
This^ is the common fallacy of treating relative admit rates as a proxy for relative quality while ignoring the impact of regional competition. Columbia currently has a lower admit rate than Princeton and Yale. We could spend a lot of time arguing about which ranking system is most appropriate to compare those three schools, but I’d be very surprised if many of them placed Columbia above the other two. Columbia is unquestionably a top-tier university, but it gets a lot of applications just because it’s the Manhattan Ivy.
I’m not purporting to rank HYPS today, but, analogously to Columbia, S gets (and 30 years ago also got) a lot of applications as a result of being the Silicon Valley university and, more broadly, the top university west of the Mississippi, with much less regional competition than the Ivies. An ever-increasing portion of the US population (not to mention every member of the rapidly growing population of applicants to top-tier schools from Asia) has their home a thousand miles or more nearer to S than any of the Ivies and therefore has some degree of natural preference for it over HYP (irrespective of which school is actually better by whatever measure you choose).
Collectively and individually HYP win more of the top-tier applicants from east of the Mississippi, but have to fight over this group among themselves. If any one of HYP suddenly disappeared from the earth, the other two would be expected to see a noticeable increase in selectivity and yield (one can see indications of how this would play out by looking at what happened early this decade when HYP switched around their ED policies, which affected their competitiveness relative to each other).
Maybe we can get back to talking about UChicago now on this UChicago thread?
like I said lots of heuristics and rationalization… yet no stats? lots of east coast myopia.
btw u of chicago had an admit rate of 70% back in 1997 now it’s a lot lower. definitely a school on the rise.
Oooooh boy.
Admit rates are very loosely correlated with a school’s quality. Should we dump $5 million into marketing efforts designed to drum up applications from kids with a 0.1% chance of admission? It would lower our acceptance rate. Would it make the College any better?
This isn’t just a thought experiment. Juding by the broad range of grades+test scores among students at my HS who got promotional materials, we’re already doing so. Nondorf has won UChicago some CC notoriety for sending materials to every kid with a pulse and an above-average PSAT score. The swag might be cool, and it definitely pushes admit rates down, but this isn’t what makes the U of C a good school.
On this point, I agree with @DeepBlue86.