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<p>But endowment per student is also misleading. Many of the costs of running a college or university are fixed costs, more or less independent of the number of students the institution serves. If you want a 10 million volume library, it will cost you the same amount of money whether you have 1,000 students or 35,000. If you want electronic subscriptions to 5,000 academic journals, it’s probably going to cost you roughly the same whatever your size. If you pay your president $750,000 a year, that cost is the same whether it’s spread across 1,000 students or 35,000 students. Larger schools have major economies of scale that are lost in endowment-per-student calculations.</p>
<p>rjkofnovi is also right that legislative appropriations to public universities are the equivalent of billions in endowment. Most universities take a payout from their endowment at a rate of 5% of endowment assets. At that rate, an annual legislative appropriation of $300 million is the equivalent of $6 billion in endowment.</p>
<p>On the other hand, most public institutions probably take in less tuition revenue per student (net of institutional financial aid) than the top privates.</p>