<p>^ I think this makes a good point. And these are details the average looker isn’t privy to. </p>
<p>The 2008 crisis showed that some schools have wiser portfolios, better management of them. My school makes an annual profit that far exceeds the % taken yearly for expenses. In pure numbers, 2008 hit hard. But, the fund managers were superior in knowing how to regroup. It doesn’t begin to compare with what, say, an ordinary family experienced.</p>
<p>I wanted to add that, for my friend, the worst (actually, laughable) fin aid pkg her kid got was from Grinnell, with its huge endowment. And, she had a meager EFC and her kid was a high performer.</p>
<p>bclintonk hinted at this above, but I wanted to expound on it: it’s important to note that schools that rely heavily on endowments (and probably even those who don’t) all have “smoothing formulas” for their endowment spending. In effect, this means that temporary fluctuations in endowment value (such as in the recent recession) do not affect the college as much as you think it would, since any given budget draws from funds liquidated in previous years. Stanford, for example, has a 3-year smoothing formula, which allowed it to weather the budget cuts mostly unscathed, finishing all cuts in the first year of the recession.</p>
<p>Sure, having a large endowment means that you’re more susceptible to the fluctuations in the market, but the benefits of a large endowment far, far outweigh that risk. I don’t think there’s a single college out there that wouldn’t love to have such an endowment.</p>
<p>Endowment is also only one small piece of the financial resources of a college. Don’t forget federal and industry funding (mostly for research), alumni donations, royalties generated from licensed technologies (e.g. the endowment required to generate the cash that Stanford or MIT gets each year in cash from this is approaching $1.5 billion each), student fees, and of course state funding for public universities. </p>
<p>Endowment per student makes little sense; expenditures per capita makes much more sense. Even if you can’t completely separate graduate and undergraduate spending in the budget to determine this, it’s a much more sensible alternative to endowment per capita, which not only lumps together endowed funds for grad/undergrad and everything else (at least using a budget you can cut out graduate-only schools), but vastly understates the many and varied financial resources of a college. Endowment per capita also overestimates the spending power of small liberal arts colleges’ endowments, which haven’t reached the “economies of scale” to provide anywhere near what the larger endowments do, such as a new dorm or a new endowed professorship. Looking at budget spending also gets around the problem of not knowing what asset classes dominate a college’s portfolio.</p>
<p>too bad the “great professors” can’t be bothered with prioritizing undergraduate education. It’s nice to have a large endowment, but if the classes are taught by grad students since the professors can’t be bothered with lowly undergrads, then the professors are only of minimal use to a student.</p>
<p>I don’t think endowment can tell us everything about a college, but I think it’s as about as close as you can get in one number. IN GENERAL, colleges with larger endowments have nice facilities, smaller classes, more support, etc. It doesn’t mean it’ll be a good school for you or whoever, but nothing 100% can.</p>
<p>The size of the endowment affects the kind of program offerings a school has. Tuition-driven institutions will be characterized by behaviors such as cancelling classes at the last minute that aren’t profitable (“underenrolled,” however the institution defines that). A richer college will run small, boutique classes in specialty areas of interest because it can afford to, and faculty and students don’t have to worry so much about cancellations.</p>
<p>Colleges with low endowments that depend primarily on tuition tend to have curricula where the courses that run are either popular, or required. So endowments permit a richness of curricular content that is not available at poorer schools.</p>
<p>This begs the question, what exactly is a “tuition-driven” institution? With the lone exception of Princeton, all of the colleges in the Ivy League derive 30% or less of their operating income from endowment; a majority derive 20% or less:</p>