I do think “financially comfortable” was sufficient. Like, I don’t think most of us could expect to never have to work for a living, but we knew in a pinch we could probably go back home for a while, or get a short term loan from family, or so on.
To my knowledge, none of us were trying to actually help support our families financially while in grad school. And although I don’t know for sure if this is true, I think most of us only had deferred federal loans.
And this sort of feeds into the law school thing as well. Like we had the confidence to think that was going to be a pivot we could pull off if necessary.
So yes, I think there was a sort of background of overall financial security in most of our cases.
According to Harvard’s English department, they get 300-350 applications a year. There are around 70-80 graduating English major undergraduates a year from Harvard, and around 5%-10% will do a PhD, so 3-8. While Berkeley has many more English majors (250-300), only around 2%-4% do PhDs, so we’re talking about 5-15. The other “worthy” colleges are the same size as Harvard or smaller, so they may have 5 or 6 applicants each year.
If you calculate all of the potential English major undergraduates from all of the colleges that Harvard English department seems to consider “worthy”, you will end up with maybe 50-80 applicants. The other 220-300 did their undergraduate degrees elsewhere, and this is assuming that every Ivy+ and Berkeley prospective English PhD applicant is applying to Harvard’s PhD program.
Since UIUC and UT (and Penn State, etc) are T-20 programs, it stands to reason that a substantial number of those 220-300 (likely more) applicants are graduates of these universities.
You can find the proportion of full pay students in section H2 of a school’s CDS. Some private colleges have a majority of full pay students, even though they provide generous FA to those families with relatively lower incomes.
Meet full need/Need blind sample:
Georgetown 71% full pay/have no financial need (total full time undergrads); 2025-26 CDS
Tangential extension of your data, but if rubbing elbows with kids from elite families is your goal, I think Georgetown is definitely underrated by its US News ranking.
Agree. I have a difficult time understanding why Gtown’s endowment is relatively low. Ineffective development peeps? Large proportion of underpaid civil servants? But yet, most would seem to be from relatively affluent families even if they take relatively low paying jobs.
I believe it is in part because Georgetown counts as a relative newcomer to this world of elite national universities. In terms of endowment rankings, it appears as of 2001 it was #68, and most recently it was up to #26, so it is making progress.
Still, this would count as a severely lagging indicator. Like as in by the time I was looking at colleges in the late 1980s, Georgetown was already well-established as a college for elites. And that is, um, a long time ago now.
Could be part of it, yet Gtown has a very long history of accepting a majority of affluent students. I haven’t looked to see if their relative endowment per student has been growing faster than its peer schools.
But there are multiple ways of looking at “peer schools”. For kids intent on being in DC, the peers are GW, American, Catholic, etc. For families looking for a Catholic school, the peers are Notre Dame, BC and Holy Cross (and then a bunch more a “tier” down). And for kids looking for a strong poli sci/diplomacy launching pad, there’s a really robust list which ranges from Princeton and Tufts at the top all the way down to the many public U’s with terrific programs.
Ranking the endowment tells you one thing and one thing only- how big is the endowment. Tracking the endowment vs. the market year over year tells you another thing- how skilled are the trustees who lead the endowment committee.
Trying to extrapolate anything else is a curious activity IMHO.
I know enough to know it is complicated. But Emory, say, had the 8th largest endowment in 2001, about $4.3B to $0.69B for Georgetown. As of 2025, Emory was at $12.0B, which isn’t bad, but that was now only good for #13. And Georgetown was up to $3.95B. So, that is about 2.8X for Emory, 5.7X for Georgetown.
But . . . Emory started so far ahead! Let’s say this happens again over the next 25 years, you get something like $33.6B for Emory, $22.5 for Georgetown. Still behind after 50 years of over double the growth rate (and of course who knows if that will actually happen).
Point being, climbing up this ladder is HARD once you get into the really top endowment tiers, because the colleges already there usually intend to stay there.
Hopefully the Gtown leaders aren’t reading this, or they would mute you
I hear your point but am only looking at Gtown’s endowment relative to other T20s. And Gtown’s is relatively low. That is one reason why Georgetown’s financial aid formula is less generous than other T20 meet full need schools.
Yes, and my point is also that comparing it to other T-20’s means “one of these things is not like the other”. Georgetown wasn’t “competing” against Princeton in a meaningful way for most of its existence….
One thing to think about with the endowment comparison will be to understand what restrictions are in place around it. WashU has historically had a pretty high endowment (at least since the 1990s), but a lot of that was earmarked for the med school. I suspect Emory has a lot of its endowment similarly restricted or allocated to their medical school. Georgetown might have more of its allocated to its law school (this is a guess). So it might be a little trickier to do an apples-to-apples comparison on endowment size alone.
I think a lower endowment per student is a key reason why Georgetown has a larger portion wealthy families than Ivy+ colleges. Princeton’s endowment is ~$4 million per student. If their endowment makes a 10% gain, that’s ~$400k per student. This makes it relatively easy for Princeton to balance books with generous FA. In a good investment year, Princeton might make as high as 95% of revenue through endowment returns. Example stats from when I last checked this in 2021 are below.
Princeton Revenue per FTE Student in 2021
Investment Returns – $1.51M (95% of revenue)
Private Gifts – $49k (3% of revenue)
Government Grants – $16k (1% of revenue)
Tuition + Fees – $13k (1% of revenue)
Other – $6k (~0% of revenue)
When I checked Princeton’s FA last year, Princeton was effectively $0 cost to parents for typical $100k/year income families, effectively $0 tuition for typical $250k/year income families, and still offered significant FA to as high as $450k/year income families.
In contrast, Georgetown has a tremendously smaller endowment of ~$250k per student. With a 10% gain, that’s $25k per student. $25k is significant, but Georgetown is far more dependent on tuition and other revenue to balance books. They need to have a large portion of student body being full pay and a small portion of students being no cost to parents, for the finances to work. As such Georgetown tweaks admission system to achieve desired finances from incoming class.
In the Chetty sample (old), the colleges with highest median parents’ income were as follows. Numbers are inflation adjusted to 2026 $. While wealthy kids are dramatically overrepresented at Ivy+ colleges, the wealthiest student bodies were not Ivy+.
Colorado College – $390k
WUSTL – $380k (was need aware during sample period)
Colgate – $380k
Washington & Lee – $365k
Trinity (CT) – $360k
Middlebury – $340k
Colgate – $330k
Georgetown – $320k
Bates – $320k
Tufts – $315k
The colleges with largest portion of top 1% families were:
Trinity (CT) – 26%
Colorado College – 24%
SMU – 23%
Vanderbilt – 23%
Middlebury – 23%
Colgate – 23%
WUSTL – 23%
Wake Forest – 22%
Amherst – 21%
Georgetown – 21%
Regarding why Georgetown does not have a higher endowment. The greatest contributing factor to endowment increase at a major university is compounding from previous endowment. To achieve highest endowment, you need to start with a high endowment decades ago (preferably centuries). You are unlikely catch up with generous new donors unless the college is extremely small. The highest endowment per student colleges are below. There is a correlation with prestige, but many exceptions.
1 . Princeton – $4M per student
2. Soka* – $3M per student
3. Yale – $2.5M per student
4. Stanford – $2M per student
5. MIT – $2M per student
6. Harvard – $1.8M per student
…
117. Georgetown – $250k per student
-* Soka is a small college exception to generalizations above for universities. When Soka was founded 25 years ago, the founding endowment was high enough and class size small enough for endowment to be $3M per student for first class, when inflation adjusted to 2026 $ or over $1M/student across all 4 years. With investment gains surpassing inflation, endowment increased to $3M/student across all 4 years over past 25 years.
I know. But you are proving my point. Smith College 72% of students receive aid. Swarthmore 56% receiving aid. Harvard College 55% receive financial aid. To me it’s fair to say most students are not wealthy at those schools even though some are.
I agree it is tricky, but at WashU, for example, it makes a HUGE amount of operating revenues from net patient services and affiliated hospital revenues, which it books as unrestricted. The med school also brings in a lot of research grants. So even though running the med school is extremely expensive, I believe it usually operates at an internal surplus, meaning it is actually contributing to WashU being able to do more with less net tuition from other units. Some details here:
Honestly, WashU doesn’t have much “excuse” for ending up so high on those wealthy student rankings. But it has been trying to address that with various aid measures, with some impact on its own numbers, its peers have been changing their own numbers enough for it to make much less relative impact.
So I think part of this just ends up marketing. Colleges like WashU are well-known in certain circles, but not as much in wider circles, and getting on the radar of a more diverse group of potential students is not as easy as just offering more financial aid.
As touched on in my post above, colleges like Harvard offer generous FA for typical families with $300k+ income. Receiving FA does not mean they aren’t what typical Americans consider wealthy. In the Chetty sample, Harvard families had the following income distribution.
Top 1% Income – 15% of students
Top 5% Income – 39% of students
Top 10% Income – 53% of students
Bottom 60% Income – 20% of students
Bottom 20% Income – 4% of students
That’s a great callout. Georgetown’s hospital actually lost money and they ended up selling it (apologies for the non-free link, I couldn’t find a free version of this news - https://www.chronicle.com/article/georgetown-u-to-sell-debt-ridden-hospital/). Might explain why now 25+ years later they weren’t able to take advantage of potential hospital revenues like WashU.
The numbers that I shared were the proportion of families that had financial need, not the number that received any type of aid including merit aid, or those who took the federal student loans.
I used schools that only give need based aid, not merit aid. Including merit aid and need based aid as you did for Smith is comparing apples to oranges. FWIW 39% of Smith families have no financial need based on the 2025-26 CDS. Smith CDS - Google Drive
For addition color and nuance, see data10’s reply to you.
