Reply to 2022 Endowments--Top 17 Schools by Endowment

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "2022 Endowments--Top 17 Schools by Endowment "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Does this endowment help the kids in anyway? Not a rhetorical question. Just trying to understand if this is something we should consider while choosing the college. Does having a huge endowment help kids with internship or TA roles? Does this even remotely help with future employment opportunities?[/quote]

It’s a good question. I work in this space and can offer a few thoughts:

1. Schools with big endowments are generally going to have more generous financial aid and more endowed professorships (which attract top talent). But this is relative to school-size; for example, Amherst is #41, right above #42 Georgetown, with $3.3B but has only 1,800 undergraduate students vs. Georgetown’s 7K undergrads and 10K+ grad students. The specific upshot of that is that Amherst can go loan-free in its financial aid packages, while Georgetown still has to package lots of loans.

2. Schools that have been in the top-level fundraising game for a long time (mostly those at the top of the list) have a lot more *unrestricted* endowment money, which means they can spend it however they want. Long ago, people would give universities money with few strings attached, and that money has been growing ever since; in recent decades, giving is rarely unrestricted. So Harvard can use its massive unrestricted endowment to pay for facilities upgrades, for example, while a school with a smaller and more heavily restricted endowment has to either get a donor to pay for those upgrades (which most don’t want to do—they might want to build a new building, but they don’t want to fund lower-scale, unglamorous modernizations), issue bonds, or take the money out of the operating budget.

So it certainly has an impact on affordability and student experience, which of course has lots of downstream effects. 
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics