My understanding is a lot of endowment income typically goes to financial aid, to lower student tuition costs.
State-supported institutions receive state funding, obviously, and already provide lower tuition in the first place, hence don’t need endowment for this function.
For example, Cornell is actually divided into The “Endowed Division” and the “Statutory Division”. The “statutory division” colleges receive funding from New York State. All its in-state students enrolled in the statutory colleges receive reduced tuition regardless of demonstrated need.
from a June 2008 article:
“The yearly check from Albany functions as a de facto endowment for the statutory colleges, funding professor salaries, student services, and research initiatives. Last year, Cornell received $175 MM in state support. That’s the functional equivalent of a $3.5 billion endowment.”
$3.5 billion divided by 20,000 students is additional $175,000 endowment equivalent per capita.
I’m sure these numbers have gone down since then, since state education funding is always under pressure.
Still “quasi-endowments” of this type should not be ignored, lest ye mislead.
“Thus true inter-institutional endowment comparisons which do not detail quasi-endowments represented by state funding initiatives as well as external research funding grossly misstate the comparability between institutions which may, or may not, be inherently non-comparable.”
List of colleges and universities in the United States by endowment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia