My Richmond Experience

Spiders05
Wed, 29 Aug 2007 22:27:24 +0000

Father of the Boarder, please take a look at the Wikipedia link that you provided. UR is listed as of June 30, 2006, with an endowment of $1.388B. Dividing that figure by the roughly 3,000 undergrads (the actual number is a little less than that), you’ll find that the endowment per undergrad is $462,666, which places it just ahead of Notre Dame. The current endowment is approximately $1.6B, which increases the endowment/undergrad to $533,333. Given the lack of substantial graduate programs, a large majority of the endowment dollars go to the undergrads, whereas at schools with large grad programs, a large portion of the dollars go to the research associated with those programs.

From what I’ve been told regarding the USNWR numbers, the statistics lag two years. I think you’ll find that in the next two years, UR’s alumni giving rates will sky rocket under the new President. In fact, just two months into Dr. Ayers’ tenure, UR received a $9 million gift for a new international education building (to further build on Newsweek naming UR the “Hottest School” for International education). Additionally, of the class of 2006, over 50% gave back to the school, and over 70% of the class of 2007 gave back. Due to a few large donor families in the past, UR has never really reached out to the everyday alum, because they never needed the funds, and didn’t have to worry about playing the USNWR rankings games since they were #1 in the Master’s category for 11 or so years, by a wide margin. They’ve just recently really focused on participation rates and the old regime was so bad in many’s eyes, they would not give back until Dr. Ayers took over just two months ago.

For this year’s freshman class, only 38% were admitted, so that will really help in the next couple of years. The yield also increased. Given the lag in stats, coupled with a $10,000 tuition hike 3 years ago, which hurt our admissions numbers (which finally recovered this year to record highs), I really feel that UR is going to greatly improve on their rankings in the next couple of years.

Finally, Businessweek ranked UR’s undergrad business school as the 23rd best in the country. This was the second consecutive year they were ranked in the top 25, improving two spots over 2006. With the upcoming expansion of the B-school, I expect this ranking to continue to climb into the top 20 in the next couple of years, especially since our reputation is finally catching up (somewhat) to the level of educational excellence at the school.