@Cue7 at #11:
The university’s financial planners are always going to be looking out for that tax cliff. $8-10 million saved is $8-10 million earned. As long as the university has funds to do what it needs to do - whether that be “investment income” (potentially taxed) or direct pledged contributions, then it needn’t worry so much about the level of its endowment.
Also, Cue, you need to normalize all those endowment values you posted by the number of enrolled students. The publics don’t even begin to compare. As for the privates, ND, with it’s current endowment of nearly $14 billion and its more modest size of 13,000 enrolled, rivals Yale on a normalized basis. And Princeton beats out Harvard. UChicago beats out Columbia and Rice jumps up several notches - ahead of Penn, etc. This is a far more proper analysis of relative endowment size than merely looking at dollars.
A bit of a nit, but I’d also compare UChicago to schools like Duke or NU which are just over the “endowment tax” threshold. They lose several million a year for that position, to the tune of anywhere from $100 - $150 million in present value terms. That really has to be subtracted out from their endowment. It won’t change their absolute ranking in terms of $ values, but again, it demonstrates how endowment size doesn’t tell the whole story. UChicago would best remain right under that $500k / student threshold until the opportunity cost outweighs the benefit. Better to be right under than right over 