<p>I have always thought that prestige reflected a quality of excellence that takes years and years to develop. Now it seems that it only has to do with money. In particular, the HYPSM acronym that gets thrown around here on CC makes sense in context of endowment size.</p>
<p>As younger schools, Stanford and MIT’s endowments are increasing quite fast. In fact, Stanford has already overtaken Princeton which came as a surprise to me.</p>
<p>Actually the endowment is relied on by top schools like Michigan who get less than 10% of their funding from the state. So your statement is not entirely correct.</p>
<p>yea, and in the case of LACs, it’s kind of embarrassing because after a certain point it becomes a matter of rapidly diminishing returns. Some examples of wasteful spending, just within the last few years, would include Amherst’s demolition of two post-WWII dormitories (James and Stearns) that it decided needed lounge space – so after they were torn down, they were immediately rebuilt as nearly exact replicas of the same dorms on the exact same locations. At Williams, a recent string of demolition and reconstruction was halted only after the economy went into a tailspin. But, it was too late to save former campus landmark, Baxter Hall. At Swarthmore, famously, they fly students to and from Europe and Africa – free of charge – as part of their study abroad package (apparently, it’s cheaper to attend classes in Johannesburg for a year than to bother with flying to and from Philadelphia over the holidays.) </p>
<p>The one bright spot has been in the area of financial aid which, by all accounts, is robust. But, even that comes with a caveat: unless you are a URM, your SATs coming out of your typical blue-collar, inner-city, Catholic or rural, public high school had better be competitive with some of the best private preparatory schools in the country if you expect to even qualify for admission.</p>
<p>In short, this whole financial debacle, in hindsight, was foreseeable; there was a lot of money out there with no place to go, so it went into ever riskier investments, so-called “illiquid” investments like real estate, timber --even oil by the barrel. Something had to give.</p>
<p>UMich started their endowment fund raising only several years before the elite privates did. If UMich was established as a private institution, I think it’s endowment fund is already twice as much as they have now.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>endowment fund campaign is more of an activity of private institutions rather than of public institutions. </p></li>
<li><p>public institutions started raising endowment funds much later than the privates have started doing it. In fact, Berkeley, for example, just started raising endowment funds in a vigorous manner only about a few years from ago. </p></li>
<li><p>UMich and UVa are an “outlier” in terms of public universities having huge endowment funds. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>but even so, </p>
<ol>
<li>both UMich and UVa are not really as aggressive as their private counterparts are when it comes to endowment fund campaign in the past many years. I believe both UMich and UVa have started their fund campaign not very long ago or not as early as their private counterparts have. But I recon that if only they have started their fund raising campaign as early as their private counterparts have, their endowment funds, which you said are already large, would have been bigger than what they actually have now. UMich’s endowment fund, for example, would probably make it in the top 4 or 3 list. </li>
</ol>
<p>And for these reasons (and a lot more than I can actually write), you cannot base prestige on the volume of endowment because certain type of schools have different kinds of fund raising activities. The very nature of their existence is different as well, and therefore, it is illogical to use endowment as a basis for prestige.</p>
<p>Well since USNews changed its ranking formula to place more emphasis on resources (aka money), the NE, bluebloods rocketed to the top. (It just was not good for magazine sales to have public schools like Cal-Berkeley, UVa and UMich in the top 10 of national universities.) :D</p>
No, Tadpole has it right. Look at Duke, whose endowment and consequently reputation took off in the 1970s. Emory is another example, who shot up in recognition due to Coca-Cola money. WUStL is yet another example, who cleverly used its large endowment to lure top applicants with merit money. Olin has been open for less than a decade, but it already has a top-notch reputation due to its endowment and ability to fund its students.</p>