Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Endowments of Top 25 Research Universities

I already posted the figures for top 25 liberal arts colleges, so I might as well post these as well.



USNWRSchoolEndowmentEnrollEnd/Stu5%/stuRank
1Harvard$31,728,08019,627$1,616,553$80,8283
1Princeton$17,109,5087,802$2,192,964$109,6481
3Yale$19,374,00011,701$1,655,756$82,7882
4Columbia$7,789,57822,283$349,575$17,47915
5Chicago$6,575,12612781$514,445$25,72210
5CIT$1,772,3692,175$814,882$40,7446
5MIT$9,712,62810,566$919,234$45,9624
5Penn$6,582,02919,842$331,722$16,58616
5Stanford$16,502,60619,535$844,771$42,2395
10Duke$5,747,37714,983$383,593$19,18012
11Dartmouth$3,413,4066,141$555,839$27,7928
12Northwestern$7,182,74519,389$370,455$18,52314
13Johns Hopkins$2,598,46721,092$123,197$6,16021
14Wash U$5,280,14313,820$382,065$19,10313
15Brown$2,496,9268,695$287,168$14,35817
15Cornell$5,059,40620,939$241,626$12,08119
17Rice$4,451,4525,879$757,178$37,8597
17Vanderbilt$3,414,51412,714$268,563$13,42818
19Notre Dame$6,259,59811,992$521,981$26,0999
20Emory$5,400,36713,381$403,585$20,17911
22Georgetown$1,160,29116,871$68,774$3,43924
23Carnegie Mellon$1,017,33811,618$87,566$4,37823
23USC$3,517,17336,986$95,095$4,75522
25Wake Forest$1,058,2507,162$147,759$7,38820


The six columns above are the school's US News & World Report ranking, the school name, the endowment size (in thousands), the school's enrollment (as reported by USNWR), the endowment per student, a ratio of 5% of the endowment per student (which is roughly how much a school has to spend per student solely from tapping into the endowment), and the rank (within this sample) of the endowment per student.

I dropped public schools because I wasn't sure which endowments listed were for one particular campus versus which ones were for a system of schools.  As expected, there's a strong correlation between endowment size and ranking (-.68 between endowment and ranking and -.70 between per pupil endowment and ranking).

Notable overachievers include Penn and Columbia, which both have longstanding reputations of excellence given their placement in both the Ivy League and large, historically prominent American cities, and Johns Hopkins, which has some very prominent programs in medicine and hard sciences.

Notable underachievers include Rice, which is located in Houston, which has only recently become one of the largest cities in the nation, and Notre Dame, which has strong ties with the Catholic church.

2 comments:

Eve Proper said...

You are absolutely right to drop the public universities for the very reason you mention. One could do the research to figure out which foundations are for systems, and then do the per-student calculations based on that, but the fact is that the main campus would get the lion's share.

Corey Bunje Bower said...

Ha. I was waiting for somebody who's actually an expert on this to tell me what I messed up. I guess today's my lucky day.