When looking at undergraduate rankings, expenditures per student can be a more useful metric than size of endowment. An area of strength for UCLA
Instructional Expenditures/Total FTE
Harvard University: $42,741
UCLA: $40,196
U-M-Ann Arbor: $20,284
UVa: $15,614
UC-Berkeley: $19,397
UCI: $19,251
UT-Austin: $12,726
GT: $12,496
It’s impossible that UCLA spends $40k per student for instructional expenditures. The instate tuition is only 13k. Its Endowment per Student is only $43k, and there’s no way UCLA blows its entire endowment fund in one year.
@ThankYouforHelp I really doubt this. I have it under good word that a near majority or more of applicants who apply to Pomona and the other Claremont Colleges are from California. The exact opposite seems true, actually, California students interested in LACs seem to prefer staying in-state than going out. While other LACs have large number of students from California, the percentage of the student body from California in California LACs is substantially higher than other schools.
Some examples of California representation:
Pomona- 438/1638= 26.7%
Claremont McKenna- 501/1325= 37.81%
Harvey Mudd= 46% (according to the CDS)
Scripps= 47% (according to the CDS)
Williams- 258/2100= 12.2% (New England= 25.5%)
Wesleyan- 19% West (New England= 19%)
Amherst- Of students matriculating in recent class, 60/469= 12.7% (New England= 19%)
The percent of California students seems comparable or higher to the percent of New England students at the east coast LACs.
Furthermore, your comment 510 suggested there are no Western private U/LACs comparable to the East Coast parallels. Stanford and Pomona aren’t just excellent- they’re at the top of many metrics used for assessing schools. Lowest acceptance rate, high yields, high endowments, fellowship rates, strong students, etc. Maybe their history and alumni contributions aren’t as rich as those schools, but I don’t believe that should be a factor for rankings as it would lead to a loop of the same schools over and over. If Forbes is to be believed, actually, Stanford and Pomona do just as well, since their rankings place a significant emphasis on post-graduate success.
East coast bias is generally not too severe, but it seems to manifest for Pomona when, according to all current metrics, is a school equivalent to Williams for the undergraduate experience and student body quality, yet is ranked a 4.3 in Peer Assessment compared to a 4.7 and #15 by Counselors compared to #3. These subjective measures hinder Pomona’s place in the rankings, though #7 is definitely a respectable rank.
Harvard has a bad year in terms of its endowment. It shrank by $2 billion. The endowment now stands at a paltry $35.7 billion. (But Harvard still received a $1.7 billion distribution.)
No wonder they are not ranked #1! LOL
@PrimeMeridian The Funding and faculty tab…
Note that you can go back several years (to 2002) and UCLA will always be higher than this peer group of public universities. This is based on IPEDs info, that was supplied to the federal government.
Only a (small) portion of Endowment income goes to Instructional Expenditures. Much of it is committed to other areas (based on the donor’s wish).
For all of these publics, most funding for instructional expenditures is coming from tuition/fees and state funding. In fact, bouncing around I found a UC budget report that estimates the UC (average across all campuses) per-student average expenditures for education is higher than UM and UVA (according to this UC budget document) . The 2014-2015 (est.) breakdown was
$8,360-Student Tuition and Fees
$2,610-UC General Funds
$7,090-State General Funds
Total = 18,060 per student
The real question is why UCLA’s is so much higher than UC-Berkeley? Never could figure that one out…
Regarding FTE in Post 542: I am looking at the same figures cited, from ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■. A more inclusive stat is for Educational and General Expenditures / FTE: ‘This is a broader category, which includes the instructional expenditures listed above, plus expenditures for research, public service, academic support, student services, institutional support, plant operation & maintenance, and scholarships.’
UCLA 84,686
Mich 60,433
UNC-CH 72,074
App St 15,072
Like Prime, I am wondering how UCLA can spend so much more per UNDERGRAD, which is what FTE measures, with its much lower Endowment Assets / FTE. (Mich is 228K, UNC 102K, Appalachian State 6K).
I agree with @Gator88NE about the usefulness of expenditures per student, and recommend the site I used, though it is a few years out of date. I find the same disparity of money spent on students within LACs. Many of the less elite LACs giving away a lot of merit aid spend much less per student. You get what you pay for.
I included App State as an example of the extent to which non-flagships are under-funded, even as their tuition and housing are nearly as expensive as the flagships in their relative states. Student bodies at the flagships are from wealthier and more educated families than those at flagships, and these students are getting a deal. Sometimes you get more than what you pay for…
Should we “applaud” schools with bloated or mismanaged administration? It would be nice if USNWR didn’t just follow the money but actually scored performance.
@ClarinetDad16 And how would you measure “performance”?
@TomSrOfBoston hopefully not in ways colleges could game and importantly measurable so high school students could feel secure they can select a school with a good track record. One in which their investment in time and money would yield a good outcome.
You are an accountant? Which measurements would you recommend?
@ClarinetDad16 You were the one who suggested measuring on performance so the ball is in your court to specify.
@nostalgicwisdom I may not have made my point clear. Think about it this way. There are 39 million Californians - which is three times as many as the population of all of the New England area states combined. There are over 2 million high school students in California.
The entering class at Pomona is about 400 students, and they get about 8000 applications a year. If half are from California, well I’m not going to run the math, but it looks like about an incredibly small percentage of California students applied to Pomona.
Meanwhile, New England has a ton of great LACs and they all get a ton of applications from New England students, even though there are a lot less New England students available to apply. The percentage of New England students interested in Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Bowdoin, etc. is much much higher.
Nothing I said in my post was intended to be a knock on Pomona, which is an amazing place and deserves to be ranked right up there with Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore and Wellesley. It is right at the top of my daughter’s wish list. It was a comment on the typical California student’s general interest in LACs as a whole, which in my experience is less than the interest East Coast students have in attending LACs. And that is, in part, because there are so few LACs out here.
@nostalgicwisdom - I tend to agree with @ThankYouforHelp quoted above. You seem to disagree based on the fact that a large portion of the student body at the Claremont Colleges is Californian. While that is true, it does not automatically mean that most CA students are interested in them. You might be right, but your argument seems flawed. Also, and I admit this is purely anecdotal, but at our HS (and we live only an hour away from Claremont) I would agree that the majority focus is on the UC’s. But we are doing our part to spread the word about the 5C’s. 
How about setting up an “expected grad rate” based on GPA and test scores of admits, and then comparing that with the actual 6-year grad rate at the school?
Pro:
Cons:
Would such a “grad performance vs. expectation” metric be helpful and, if so, valid and reliable?
Washington Monthly already factors in expected vs. actual graduation rate into its rankings, for one. (There are widely used methods in existence for predicting expected grad rates.)
I agree with @ClaremontMom and @ThankYouforHelp - there seems to be more knowledge of the CA LACs than there used to be among CA kids, but they are not nearly as much on the radar as LACs seem to be for east coast kids. We have so many good public universities that they are not looked down upon here as public universities apparently are in other states.
I suspect UCLA misreported their numbers. It’s part of the UC system and I expect their numbers to be close to Berkeley. I do know they misreported their number of faculty who are NAE (National Academy of Engineering) members to USN. In the case of NAE, they included emeritus or adjunct. In this case, I suspect they probably included numbers from their medical school.
I actually took couple classes there before. While the campus looks nice on the surface (e.g. exterior and landscaping), I was not impressed with the interior. It looked more dated and wasn’t as neat and posh as the top privates.
@ThankYouforHelp @ClaremontMom I see your point. I was thinking more along the lines of representation than the whole picture. Understanding the difference in population <new england’s="" population="" (14.4="" million)="" vs="" california="" (38.8=""> makes it clearer. My apologies.
It’s all good. I probably wasn’t very clear in what I was saying, and believe me, I know how excellent Pomona is.
Hopefully this is something that we can all agree on.
@IWannaHelp I don’t think UCLA is “misreporting” the data, as much as it has something to do with how they handle internal accounting (where the money gets bucketed). Every university has it’s own budgeting standards. I would think the UC"s would be more in line with each other, but something unique may be happening in UCLA’s budget.
Anyway! My point is that the UC’s spend a LOT per student, as compared to other public universities. Even those with much larger endowments. Especially at public universities, what drives educational expenditures is tuition, fees, and state aid. Other sources of income, like research grants, etc., end up funding other aspects of the university, with very little going to undergraduate education.