<p>Hoya Saxa, carlsbaddad! Carlsbad, CA, by any chance?</p>
<p>With regard to plans for the Reiss Science Building, Dr. DeGioia described the plan as to “lovingly gut it” and renovate the interior as much as possible. Since the new science building is, in square footage terms, about the same size as Reiss, any significant expansion of the science programs, faculty, etc. will need both spaces. So post-renovation, Reiss would house departmental office space for faculty from the sciences (including math and computer science), some renovated labs to increase overall laboratory space, probably a renovated Blommer Science Library as well.</p>
<p>As to the original question for this thread, there’s usually at least one major thread per admissions cycle on the topic. For my money, I think Dr. DeGioia’s answer explains the situation pretty well. [This</a> interview](<a href=“http://blog.georgetownvoice.com/2010/01/25/on-the-record-with-john-degioia-a-full-transcript-of-the-presidents-meeting-with-student-press/#more-13094]This”>http://blog.georgetownvoice.com/2010/01/25/on-the-record-with-john-degioia-a-full-transcript-of-the-presidents-meeting-with-student-press/#more-13094) is from January 2010, so the figures might be a bit off, but the overall point holds true:</p>
<p>Hoya: My question goes along in that same vein. I know we all think we’re ranked #1 in the US News & World Report Rankings.</p>
<p>DeGioia: We’re 23.</p>
<p>Hoya: Right, I know. I was wondering what the plan was to continue to increase our ranking?</p>
<p>DeGioia: Truly one of the fundamental ways in which we can increase our ranking is to increase the size of our endowment. That’s the constraint for us. So if you look at the numbers, you’ll see that on some of the scores we rank significantly higher—for example on selectivity for admission, I mean we’re much higher than twenty-third…</p>
<p>What holds us back from being higher in the rankings is our endowment is 73rd in the country. So we compete among the top 25 in the US News & World report but we’re 73rd in endowment size. Now why is our endowment so small? It’s just history. Until 1969, we were literally owned by a group of priests, the community of Jesuits of Georgetown University. They owned the place until 1969 … in 1969 they separately incorporated, leaving behind the university that became the responsibility of a new Board of Directors. Now this happens with all of Catholic higher education in the late 1960s. One school got ahead of that—that was Notre Dame. They did it about 15 years earlier … is my recollection. They began fundraising that much earlier.</p>
<p>Most of us didn’t really get started fundraising until the ’70s and early ’80s. Georgetown has done three fundraising campaigns, one in ‘81, one in ‘88 and one in ‘96 that went to 2003. ‘81 went from ‘81 to roughly ‘86—that was our first real campaign. The second campaign was around the time of our bicentennial. The third one was what we called our third century campaign. I think that history will show that other universities did other campaigns beginning a long time ago. The reason schools have bigger endowments is that they started fundraising a lot earlier than we did.</p>
<p>We’re actually doing pretty well but we got started so much later—our endowment is a billion dollars. Harvard’s endowment this year was 24 billion at the start of the year. I mean, 24 times our size. Yale is at 17 billion. Most of the peers that we compete with are at least five times our endowment size. This is relevant in the context of US News & World Report rankings because they call it different things but one of the terms that they typically use is faculty resources. Well, faculty resources is a proxy for essentially your overall endowment size, or sometimes gift income or the like. There, we do actually reasonably well in terms of how we’re doing now…but the endowment is a legacy of the first 200 years at Georgetown. The goal this 100 years is to use all 100 years to try and close that gap so that when our grandchildren might think about this place, the gap might be…we wont be 73rd. I mean, the gap between schools that are ranked below us…I mean, we’re 73rd and 23rd—there are 50 that have more resources than we do and that’s really what holds us back in US News & World Report because on so many of the other metrics we do very well. And truly, knowing how they keep score, I don’t really have a criticism of where we are with US News.</p>
<p>Now Charlie Deacon will. He’ll say there’s only one reason why they do that ranking. They do it—they’re communicating directly with high school seniors about how they should be thinking in their rankings of the schools. If that’s what they’re doing, then we deserve to be much higher ranked because were in the top ten in terms of undergraduate selectivity—so I don’t disagree with Charlie but the metrics that they use are more encompassing than that. When I look at that, I don’t really have any complaints about being 23rd. That being said, we’re doing everything we can to try to inch our way up. And that’s about fundraising…so the next campaign is absolutely about getting our endowment to go up.</p>