Growth in endowments since 1990 (who's keeping up with Harvard and who's not)

Parents Forum
1

To geeks like me, this is fascinating stuff.

2014 endowment values:
http://www.nacubo.org/Documents/EndowmentFiles/2014_Endowment_Market_Values.pdf

From here, you can pull the 1990 endowment values:
http://www.nacubo.org/Research/NACUBO-Commonfund_Study_of_Endowments/Public_NCSE_Tables/Total_Market_Value_of_Endowments.html

In that quarter century or so, Harvard’s endowment has grown by almost eightfold.

A quite impressive growth rate that’s tough to keep up with.

Yet some schools have (impressively) surpassed that growth rate while others have lagged (some significantly).

Some notables:
Surpassers:
Michigan (by a huge amount)
Stanford
Northwestern
UPenn
Notre Dame
Duke
Virginia

Laggards:
Columbia
WashU
Emory
Rice
Cornell
JHU
NYU
CMU
Caltech (by a lot)
Rochester (by a lot)
Rockefeller (by a lot)
Case Western (by a lot)

One conclusion you can draw is that being good in sports helps. You also can’t really see from my list, but the publics (most starting from a rather low base) have also been growing their endowments more rapidly in recent decades.
UMich use to have a smaller endowment than Caltech. Now their endowment is nearly 5 times bigger than Caltech’s.
It’s interesting (because they are both bigger Ivies) that while Cornell use to have a slightly bigger endowment than UPenn, now UPenn has a significantly bigger endowment than Cornell. My guess is that the rise in inequality (and the rise in the affluence of Wharton alums) has really benefited UPenn. They’re the only non-FBS university that has outperformed Harvard to a measurable degree.

2

I think it was in the late 90’s when Congress began to ask why these institutions should be sheltered from paying tax and generally receive other perqs of being a not-for-profit enterprise when they were not serving the public good, and their expenditure towards education (the stated purpose of the non-profit status) was diminishing since tuition was covering an ever-greater proportion of the cost of a student’s education. Harvard especially was singled out as having more cash than a small country, with very low momentum in the cash flow. It was at this time that the schools (magnanimously, out of the goodness of their hearts, I’m sure) started to offer a free education to those whose incomes are below a certain threshold (like $60,000), and re-tooled their financial aid- under threat of a congressional investigation into their non-profit status.

With the unbridled self-aggrandizing growth and investment in physical plant and faculty at many universities, and the ever-increasing tuition-donations and tax-free status notwithstanding; one wonders whether Congress will once again come calling.

Are they fulfilling their duty as national resources worthy of tax-free favorable status by the government?

3

By this metric Emory is a laggard for only seeing a near six fold increase in its endowment…

4

@whenhen: Yep. Most of the other elite privates have done better.
Endowment growth over the past quarter century has been crazy.