<p>It seems to me that there comes a point where the endowment per student is so great that increasing it even further raises the quality of education only slightly.</p>
<p>If a college has an endowment of $500,000 per student and another has an endowment of $1 million per student, you can’t say that the richer school will give an education that’s twice as good. I think everyone would agree on that. I wonder if it’s safe to say that going from $500,000 per student to $1 million only will provide a very small increase in the quality of education?</p>
<p>I know next to nothing about higher education, but it seems to me that when dealing with top schools that all have enormous endowments, an endowment is more an indicator of how financially successful the alumni have been, and how willing they have been to give back instead of necessarily how good the education will be.</p>
<p>ID’s analogy:</p>
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<p>This assumes that a $69,000 Mercedes is worth $69,000 to the buyer. Say that, for example, a $40,000 unnamed car would work for a prospective buyer. To the buyer, a Mercedes is only worth $2,000 more to them. In that case, the Mercedes is worth $42,000 to the buyer. I mean if Swarthmore spent, for example, $50,000 on a piece of equipment and school B only had the money to spent $25,000 on a slightly cheaper piece of equipment, is this really such a big loss? Will it even impact the quality of education of the student at school B at all?</p>
<p>My (perhaps naive) take can best be explained by exaggerating things. Say school A spent $200,000 per student, and school B spent $210,000 per student. This increase is really so small as to much such a minor difference in things. When Swarthmore has $69,000 to spent per student and another school has “only” $60,000 or $55,000 per student, is this really as substantial an increase as we make it out to be?</p>