US News 2017 rankings

College Search & Selection
661

Endowments Per Full Time Equivalent Student
(source: IPEDS, FY 2014)
Column 1: endowment per student rank
Column 2: USNWR national universities rank
Column 3: difference between the two ranks

EPS …USNWR… DIFF … EPS … Institution
1 … 1 … 0 … $2,529,051 … Princeton University
2 … 3 … -1 … $1,690,777 … Yale University
3 … 2 … 1 … $1,549,324 … Harvard University
4 … 5 … -1 … $1,384,814 … Stanford University
5 … 7 … -2 … $1,110,080 … Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6 … 12 … -6 … $964,526 … California Institute of Technology
7 … 15 … -8 … $822,651 … Rice University
8 … 11 … -3 … $683,841 … Dartmouth College
9 … 15 … -6 … $642,736 … University of Notre Dame
10 … 19 … -9 … $492,231 … Washington University in St Louis
… … … …
11 … 3 … 8 … $478,578 … University of Chicago
12 … 20 … -8 … $454,364 … Emory University
13 … 8 … 5 … $405,207 … University of Pennsylvania
14 … 12 … 2 … $389,851 … Northwestern University
15 … 8 … 7 … $388,472 … Duke University
16 … 15 … 1 … $347,020 … Vanderbilt University
17 … 5 … 12 … $346,848 … Columbia University in the City of New York
18 … 14 … 4 … $335,580 … Brown University
19 … 24 … -5 … $246,046 … University of Virginia-Main Campus
20 … 27 … -7 … $215,426 … University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
… … … …
21 … 15 … 6 … $209,512 … Cornell University
22 … 37 … -15 … $182,179 … Case Western Reserve University
23 … 32 … -9 … $181,950 … University of Rochester
24 … 31 … -7 … $163,826 … Boston College
25 … 10 … 15 … $159,663 … Johns Hopkins University
26 … 27 … -1 … $150,383 … Wake Forest University
27 … 27 … 0 … $143,467 … Tufts University
28 … 34 … -6 … $124,913 … Brandeis University
29 … 23 … 6 … $121,216 … University of Southern California
30 … 24 … 6 … $105,620 … Carnegie Mellon University
… … … …
31 … 32 … -1 … $96,153 … College of William and Mary
32 … 20 … 12 … $95,172 … Georgetown University
33 … 30 … 3 … $91,912 … University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
34 … 39 … -5 … $91,803 … Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
35 … 39 … -4 … $91,454 … Tulane University of Louisiana
36 … 34 … 2 … $84,403 … Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus
37 … 36 … 1 … $71,110 … New York University
38 … 39 … -1 … $50,738 … Boston University
39 … 20 … 19 … $43,215 … University of California-Berkeley
40 … 24 … 16 … $38,498 … University of California-Los Angeles
41 … 39 … 2 … $31,345 … Northeastern University
42 … 39 … 3 … $10,011 … University of California-Irvine
43 … 37 … 6 … $6,242 … University of California-Santa Barbara

Some universities ranked worse than USNWR #40 possibly have EPS ranks better than #40.
Syracuse University for example had an EPS of $54,367, which would fall between NYU and BU.

As for high-ranking LACs, Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore and Pomona all had endowments per student of over $1M.

662

Revenues Per Full Time Equivalent Student
(source: IPEDS, FY 2014)
Column 1: revenues per student rank
Column 2: USNWR national universities rank
Column 3: difference between the two ranks
(see post #649 for a list of IPEDS-tracked revenue sources)

Rev …USNWR… DIFF … TOTAL … Institution Name
1 … 1 … 0 … $497,623 Princeton University
2 … 3 … -1 … $446,196 Yale University
3 … 7 … -4 … $436,824 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
4 … 5 … -1 … $436,197 Stanford University
5 … 2 … 3 … $372,014 Harvard University
6 … 12 … -6 … $331,695 California Institute of Technology
7 … 11 … -4 … $245,209 Dartmouth College
8 … 19 … -11 … $235,088 Washington University in St Louis
9 … 8 … 1 … $213,551 Duke University
10 … 3 … 7 … $198,593 University of Chicago
… … …

11 … 10 … 1 … $198,561 Johns Hopkins University
12 … 15 … -3 … $183,936 Rice University
13 … 15 … -2 … $183,306 University of Notre Dame
14 … 5 … 9 … $180,745 Columbia University in the City of New York
15 … 12 … 3 … $177,051 Northwestern University
16 … 8 … 8 … $176,926 University of Pennsylvania
17 … 27 … -10 … $166,067 Wake Forest University
18 … 20 … -2 … $155,934 Emory University
19 … 15 … 4 … $133,860 Vanderbilt University
20 … 14 … 6 … $121,971 Brown University
… … …

21 … 15 … 6 … $113,567 Cornell University
22 … 37 … -15 … $106,213 Case Western Reserve University
23 … 32 … -9 … $101,221 University of Rochester
24 … 27 … -3 … $100,954 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
25 … 24 … 1 … $96,247 Carnegie Mellon University
26 … 24 … 2 … $92,208 University of California-Los Angeles
27 … 23 … 4 … $87,187 University of Southern California
28 … 24 … 4 … $84,654 University of Virginia-Main Campus
29 … 20 … 9 … $83,678 Georgetown University
30 … 36 … -6 … $83,364 New York University
… … …

31 … 27 … 4 … $82,313 Tufts University
32 … 30 … 2 … $78,960 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
33 … 20 … 13 … $65,141 University of California-Berkeley
34 … 39 … -5 … $62,258 Tulane University of Louisiana
35 … 31 … 4 … $61,770 Boston College
36 … 34 … 2 … $58,706 Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus
37 … 39 … -2 … $58,112 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
38 … 39 … -1 … $57,301 University of California-Irvine
39 … 34 … 5 … $55,711 Brandeis University
40 … 39 … 1 … $52,382 Boston University
41 … 39 … 2 … $42,378 Northeastern University
42 … 32 … 10 … $39,557 College of William and Mary
43 … 37 … 6 … $38,161 University of California-Santa Barbara

This ranking corresponds even more closely than the above endowment-only ranking does to the USNWR national university ranking. The endowment-only rankings, on average, differ by 5.63 positions from the USNWR rankings. These revenue rankings, on average, differ by only 4.70 positions from the USNWR rankings. For 15 colleges, the difference between the USNWR rank and the above revenue rank is no greater than 2 positions. For only 3 is it greater than 10.

For the 9 state universities alone, the revenue rankings on average differ by 4.78 positions from the USNWR rankings. USNWR ranks 7 of these 9 state university higher (better) than the above revenue rankings.

663

tk, measuring the delta between the financial data you provide above and the USNWR overall ranking does not make sense. It should be between the data you provide above and the financial resources rank (Michigan is #40 and UVa #50). I think we can agree that Michigan and UVA’s financial resources rank should be significantly higher since their endowment per student, without factoring the $300 million in annual state funding, is among the top 20. Like I said many times before, the USNWR ranking is unreliable and seriously penalizes public universities. There is no way that there are 40-50 universities that are better off financially than Michigan or UVa.

664

Ranking by Endowment, by total revenues, and by the USNWR “financial resources” gives 3 different perspectives on available institutional wealth. The “revenues” sources tracked by IPEDS do include revenues from state and local appropriations per FTE (as well as 5 other sources). The USNWR “financial resources” category focuses on expenditures (“average spending per full-time-equivalent student on instruction, research, public service, academic support, student services and institutional support during the 2014 and 2015 fiscal years”).

If you look at the full gamut of revenues available to these schools, it appears to me that Michigan and UVa are in the top 30, but not the top 20 (assuming the IPEDS data is reliable). However, universities aren’t necessarily spending all available revenues on the same things (or to equal effect). I’ve looked at IPEDS data on instructional spending per student for some of these schools. Already I can see for example that although Princeton is #1 for both endowment and revenues per student, it’s lower than that by instructional spending per student. The top state universities appear to be lower than at least the top 10 private universities, in most cases by significant margins.

I haven’t seen the break-down of all the USNWR “financial resources” expenditures. I don’t currently have a subscription to unlock the individual FR ranks. I’m surprised that Michigan is only #40 and UVa only #50.

665

@Alexandre I thought State funding was included in the school’s endowment, and not a separate fund (is this why Wikipedia has endowment and budget listed separately?)

666

Endowment size (even per student) can be pretty misleading. Universities with medical schools / health systems can have 30% or more of the endowment and they have relatively few students. Likewise, business and law schools can have disproportionate shares. At one state university mentioned here frequently, the school of arts and sciences (including graduates), which has about 70% of the total student population, only has 13% of the endowment. The LACs are another matter. Most of their endowment is focused on undergraduates.

Likewise, there is NO guarantee that endowment will directly benefit undergraduate education. Endowment growth has greatly outpaced spending on teaching. The fastest growing areas are in administration, auxiliary enterprises, and research.

667

I disagree tk. Purely from a wealth and revenues point of view, when you include endowment, state funding, income generation etc…Michigan and UVa would both be among the top 20, perhaps even among the top 15. They are as wealthy as schools like Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Penn.

The problem with looking at spending figures is that it does not mean much in a vacuum. Private universities earn more, per student, from tuition, but also spend more, per student, on financial aid. Most private elites also have higher average faculty salaries for a number of reasons: 1. private universities are usually located in areas with a higher cost of living 2. a higher proportion of professional programs faculty because most private universities have significantly larger professional programs relative to their liberal arts faculties and 3. public universities, even the wealthier ones, tend to be market matchers when it comes to faculty salaries. However, at least in the case of Michigan and several other excellent public universities, paying slightly lower salaries does not mean that those public universities cannot attract and retain top faculty. Michigan’s faculty is among the best in the nation.

IsaacTheFuture, the budget figure you see in Wikipedia is the university’s annual budget (how much money the university spends). When I say state funding, I mean money received by public universities from their respective states.

668

Alexandre,

UVA has an academic budget of $1.39B for 22K students, or an average of $63K per student. Penn has an academic budget of $2.99B for 24.8K students, or about $121K per student. That is about 90% more per student. A lot of that shows up in the student/faculty ratio. At UVA it is 15:1. At Penn it is 6:1. Average professor salary at Penn was $198K in 2014. At UVA it was $152K in 2014.

At least in this case, I don’t think you can say UVA is as wealthy as Penn.

But, all this is crazy. If you can’t educate someone for $63K per year, something is wildly wrong. $121K per year per student would just be waste if it really were dedicated to education, wouldn’t it? But it isn’t dedicated to education, is it? A lot of this expenditure has nothing to do with educating undergraduates. The amount of time faculty members spend teaching is going down. Their commitment to undergraduate teaching in many cases has very little impact their career.

669

Alexandre made a good point about how funds are allocated (such as faculty salaries & financial aid). A better way to get a glimpse at how the money is being spent on students is to look at R&D expenditure (this can still be skewed by stuff over representation of engineering majors, but it still gives you a way better overall picture).

UMich: $30,620
UVA: $16,976
Brown: $37,699
Columbia: $31,070
Cornell: $43,572
UPenn: $34,735

Now, UMich is definitely comparable to all these elite private Unis (With the exception of Cornell, who is spending about $13k more per student), but UVA is definitely lagging behind. Why the big discrepancy between R&D expenditure & Endowment? I would hypothesize that UVA spends a disproportionate amount on their professors (which MAY suggest better profs, but this is just a hypothesis). Another explanation may be that since UVA isn’t that big of an engineering school (even Brown is more well known in that aspect), and engineering is known to use up a lot of money, it draws their numbers down (which may also explain why Cornell’s is so high, seeing as they’re the best engineering school in the Ivies). Still, that wouldn’t explain why Brown dedicates so much resources to their students compared to UVA, especially since Brown isn’t the most well known engineering school either. Just for some insight on how those schools stack up to their private and public peers:

Private:
Harvard: $48,274
Princeton: $34,601
Yale: $65,221
Duke: $69,344
MIT: $82,226
Stanford: $64,405
Rice: $21,845

Publics:
UCLA: 23,584
UC Berkeley: $20,639
UNC Chapel Hill: $33,241
Ga. Tech: $30,594
UT. Austin: $12,770

To no surprise, MIT is leaps and bounds ahead, but what surprises me is how much Duke dishes out and how little (comparatively to it’s HYPSM peers) Yale & Rice are spending on their students. Even Harvard is relatively lagging behind. One thing that could be affecting Rice’s numbers is it’s location; located in one of the biggest cities in the US that houses the largest cancer research center in the nation, Rice wouldn’t have to spend too much on it’s students, since they would have plenty of off campus opportunities at their disposal (could also explain why Columbia doesn’t spend more, seeing as they’re in New York). Do you have any reasoning for why Rice’s R&D is so low? But a school like Brown is so high?
When it comes to the Publics, GA Tech and UNC Chapel Hill can be compared to Umich, Brown, UPenn, & Columbia, & UNC is even larger than that of Columbia, which definitely surprised me.

Also, though I generally agree with you on your points, I have to disagree with the generalization of cost of living for elite private University cities. Sure, Columbia, UPenn, & UChicago professors have to be compensated more for living in such expensive cities, but schools like Cornell, Dartmouth, & even Emory (when compared to other large cities, Atlanta is cheap as hell) don’t face the same dilemma. So you can’t put too much emphasis on cost of living for the city when looking at endowment.

https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=rankingBySource&ds=HERD&o=n&s=a#H

670

Another Hypothesis is that schools like Rice & Columbia could be spending more on their professors, leading to higher quality professors, just like UVA (just my two cents)

671

@IsaacTheFuture , UVa is actually higher ranked in engineering than Brown. UVa is a very respectable school for undergraduate engineering ( #32 overall vs. #44 for Brown with engineering schools that have doctoral programs.) UVa’s engineering is not as well known as its’s arts and sciences programs and another public school,Virginia Tech ( at #16) has a much larger engineering program than UVa. But, UVa engineers are very well recruited .

672

@sevmom Huh, didn’t know that. Thanks for the fact check.

673

Isaac,

Much of these R&D expenditures come from federal sources. A huge percentage of that is related to health sciences. Schools without medical schools are typically lower, even if they are very strong in engineering. This is why Berkeley and UT Austin are relatively low.

In the case of Michigan, they put $433M of institutional resources into research, which propels them to be one of the top research institutions. I don’t think this is necessarily a good thing. http://www.bestcolleges.com/features/colleges-with-highest-research-and-development-expenditures/

Again, though, how much does this really contribute to undergraduate education? Do you think graduates of these schools are better educated on the whole than someone coming out of Davidson? I sure don’t.

674

Another hypothesis is that universities have “faculty” that are funded by and completely motivated by getting research grants and have very little to do with the enterprise of teaching students.

675

Isaac,

Your assumption that R&D spending is “on students” is incorrect in my view, specifically from an undergraduate perspective. Although some may have research opportunities, most of this is completely tangential to undergraduate education.

676

^^ Depends on the institution—some involve effectively all undergrads directly in research.

Also, any discussion of faculty needs to recognize the difference between total faculty (which generally includes, e.g., adjuncts), permanent faculty (a misnomer that often includes non-tenure track faculty but not adjuncts), and tenure-track faculty.

677

“UVA has an academic budget of $1.39B for 22K students, or an average of $63K per student. Penn has an academic budget of $2.99B for 24.8K students, or about $121K per student.”

Like I said IzzoOne, it is difficult to compare universities based on how much they spend. In addition to the reasons I listed in post #666 (coincidence? In think not! :wink: ), most public universities have been cutting costs on unnecessary functions and programs and merging/consolidating service departments and other related programs for decades and are in fact leaner, without impacting the functionality or quality of operations.

This is ironic considering the fact that public institutions are usually the ones that are considered more bloated and not as lean as private institutions. That is clearly not the case with universities, where public universities have had to adapt to changing circumstances for decades.

Finally, we have very little visibility in what universities include in their “academic budget”. For these, and a host of other reasons, I do not think it makes sense to look at spending.

Endowment, state funding and revenues are the three figures that should be factored in the financial resources rating of a university.

“A lot of that shows up in the student/faculty ratio. At UVA it is 15:1. At Penn it is 6:1. Average professor salary at Penn was $198K in 2014. At UVA it was $152K in 2014.”

Actually, Penn did not include graduate students in its student to faculty ratio. If it did, its ratio would be more like 11:1. Yet another way that private universities deceive the public and game the rankings. If you factor in graduate students in the student to faculty ratios, most elite private universities will have ratios that hover between 10:1 and 15:1. Also, the ratio of small to large classes at private universities and classes sizes in general, between elite private and elite public universities does not vary nearly as much as the “statistics” would seem to indicate when you compare apples to apples, although admittedly, smaller private elites will naturally have the edge in this department. However, in the last two decades or so, private universities have added thousands of seminars to their course catalogues while public universities have not, and this has given the appearance that classes at public universities are significantly smaller. That is not the case. But are smaller classes always necessary and better? If so, why aren’t wealthy public universities, like Michigan and UVa, that can easily make classes smaller if they wished to not doing anything about it? Could it be that in some cases smaller classes are a waste of resources?

678

Alexandre, I was responding to your comment that schools like UVA are as “wealthy” as schools like Penn. Looking at all sources of revenue and resources, it doesn’t look like that is the case. Although they are similarly sized, Penn’s budget is 1.9X significantly larger, Penn claims 2.2X the number of faculty (although they could have more adjunct, etc), and they do 2.3X the amount of research.

Note that research is really a major factor here. Penn does nearly $500M more research than UVA. UVA recognizes this as one of its “weaknesses” versus its competitors. BTW, UVA is now starting to try to self-fund research with a “Strategic Investment Fund”.

You then started writing about how lean UVA is compared to Penn. But lean and “wealth” are different measures, and it is difficult to measure efficiency. My view is that a lot of this spending (both Penn and UVA and others) doesn’t have much to do with educating undergraduates, and USNews has always done a great disservice by focusing on it. LACs can “spend” significantly less on undergraduates than these national universities, but in my admittedly objective experience, the quality of the education they received seems to be just as high (if not higher).

dfbdfb, my comment regarding undergraduate research was not that undergraduates don’t participate in research, it was that you can count R&D spending as spending on undergraduates as Isaac did. I’m pretty sure Johns Hopkins $2.1B in research isn’t all lavished on its undergraduates.

679

But Izzo, UVa is as wealthy as Penn. When you factor in state funding, UVa is roughly identical to Penn. You are referring to spending, not wealth. Penn spends more money, but that does not make it richer. It simply means that Penn is more expensive to maintain, likely due to having to spend more money of faculty salaries, undergraduate financial aid, research facilities etc…One should not confuse wealth with spending.

680

That is not what the IPEDS revenue data appears to show. That data covers revenues from investments as well as from state/local appropriations (and other sources). If you have better data, maybe you’d like to cite your sources and lay out your evidence.

This is complicated stuff. A lot depends on how you define wealth or “financial resources”. If USNWR is using expenditure figures that consistently show a lower rank for state universities than the endowment or revenue figures would show, then arguably this is a bias against state universities. One might also argue that using expenditures is consistent with a focus on what the money buys for undergraduate students (smaller classes, better-paid faculty, better financial aid and facilities, etc.)

One might ask whether all that expense doesn’t reach a point of diminishing returns beyond what a Berkeley or a Michigan spends on instruction. USNWR states that it applies a logarithmic transformation to its financial resource calculations. Therefore, “schools that have expenditures per student that are far higher than most other schools’ values see diminishing benefits in the ranking calculations.” (http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights). Nevertheless, in the Parchment cross-admit rankings, Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, and UVa do come out ahead of some USNWR T20 private schools. So maybe US News places a higher value on extra expenditures (or on what they are buying) than many students and parents do.