I just saw some very interesting numbers in an article in the May/June 2015 Dartmouth alumni magazine . . . the story is “Why is Dartmouth so Expensive” but the number that really jumps out is for Yale. The article doesn’t seem to be online yet but the chart is on p. 43 of the hard copy magazine.
It shows Yale’s spending per student is 2x or more that at peer schools. Since tuition is roughly comparable it looks like Yale students get a better deal, at least by this metric (they pay about the same as they would elsewhere, but Yale spends a lot more on them).
Any thoughts on where the additional money is spent at Yale? I assume the residential college system is a significant part of the answer, as I think both the physical facilities and the amount of faculty/staff resources (masters, deans, resident fellows, etc.) are more extensive (and expensive) than at other places. I’m guessing the faculty/student ratio may also be lower at Yale and there are probably other factors as well.
Here are the spending per student numbers in the article. It’s not a big surprise to me that the numbers are higher than at places like Williams and Amherst - excellent schools but ones that have far less money than Yale - but the numbers are also much higher than at Princeton and Harvard.
Yale $177,314
Princeton $87,518
Dartmouth $82,101
Harvard $74,360
Williams $61,881
Amherst $53,975
Brown $48,849
Tufts $44,916
It says this is FY 2013 data provided by each school to The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
Pretty striking . . . not sure why but I bet you’re right that the residential college system is part of it as it seems like a lot of resources are devoted to that.
I googled “The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System” looking for confirmation on the data, but I couldn’t find it. I suspect it’s a typo from the Dartmouth publication ($177,314 vs $77,314).
Harvard’s residential college system is very similar to Yale’s, so I don’t think that would account for Yale spending $103,000 more per student than Harvard, which has the largest endowment of any US college. If it is indeed a typo, Yale’s figure of $77,314 that would put it in line with Harvard, Princeton and Dartmouth – which makes more sense.
@gibby you may be right. It definitely says $177k in the article but that could be a typo. It looks like the data source cited is a US Department of Education site but so far I haven’t been able to track down the specific numbers.
I just found an old thread here that looks at these numbers - from 2007 but the relative size of the numbers is similar to what the article in the Dartmouth magazine shows. It seems like there is a fair amount of complexity in the numbers, with several pages of discussion in the thread.
Back when I got a paycheck, I did some work on hardware/software costs for a bank. There were dozens of ways to determine the result, each with a reasonable explanation for why one would do it that way. In the end, it was usually a matter of what management wanted to emphasize.
@IxnayBob , you make good sense, but the breakdown in how the values were reported seemed consistent between schools. A quick look at the operating expenses of Harvard (4.4B) vs Yale (3.1B) and enrollment of Harvard (21K) and Yale (12K) would support a large differential.