<p>I just bought Sparknote’s “283 Great Colleges” and noticed something odd. The total endowment for: Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Emory, University of Penn, Cornell, and Columbia are all listed as $4,294,967,295 (and possibly more that I didn’t see).</p>
<p>There’s obviously no way that this is true. Any thoughts?</p>
<p>Just saw University of Chicago, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Washington University in St. Louis, and Noter Dame too!</p>
<p>MIT and Texas A&M University- College Station also.</p>
<p>Such an exciting Saturday night right here haha</p>
<p>My guess it was some sort of place-holder number they were using in pre-production of the book and forgot to replace with the real numbers later.</p>
<p>Not sure why’d they use that number though, I’d think they’d use a nice even number for a filler or something.</p>
<p>Which is why PR and Fiske are the typical recommendations.</p>
<p>4,294,967,295 is the highest number you can get using 32 binary digits. I see it on forums sometimes as a joke (that only people with programming knowledge get). </p>
<p>Even PR and Fiske are prone to glaring statistical errors because they have to be updated every year.</p>
<p>Yeah i got Fiske too, their ACT scores seem a little high though</p>