When discussing endowment, people often fail to consider that several of Cornell’s colleges receive funding from the State of New York. In fact its colleges are divided internally into the “endowed division” and the “statutory division”.
I will just cut and paste from a prior post of mine:
"Upon a quick look, this was taken from a June 2008 article:
"The yearly check from Albany functions as a de facto endowment for the statutory colleges, funding professor salaries, student services, and research initiatives. Last year, Cornell received $175 MM in state support. That’s the functional equivalent of a $3.5 billion endowment.
Next year? $169 MM."
It goes on to decry that these sums represent less than 30% of the statutory college’s budget, whereas it used to be 70%, and that the support in real terms has been declining.
That trend is undoubtedly accelerated currently, as the NY State budget is certainly challenged these days. Nevertheless, that’s still a lot of money that has been coming in that is not accounted for in [endowment amount listing] Just back of the hand, $3.5 billion divided by 20,000 students is additional $175,000 endowment equivalent per capita.
External research funding is probably also not accounted for.
“Thus true inter-institutional endowment comparisons which do not detail quasi-endowments represented by state funding initiatives as well as external research funding grossly misstate the comparability between institutions which may, or may not, be inherently non-comparable.”
List of colleges and universities in the United States by endowment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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