<p>After reading in the newspaper this morning that Columbia is getting another huge endowment, 400,000,000! Where are NYU’s esteemed alumni to leave some endowment money!</p>
<p>400 mil is a tiny TINY endowment. yale’s is 21,000,000,000. NYU’s is something around 1.5 bil and that’s pretty small for the amount of students.</p>
<p>I’ve heard explanations that reason NYU’s lack of a large enough endowment is due to the fact that only recently has it become a school of such high caliber…so the wealth among the alumni base is much less than that of, for example, columbia.</p>
<p>when i attended nyu, it was one of the two largest real estate holders in the village (st. vincent’s hospital was the other). i would guess with the acquisition of multiple properties for new dorms and facilities, it is likely the largest real estate holder in the area now. columbia & yale can’t compete (i would guess) with those kinds of holdings. i imagine that’s why they need less in endowments?</p>
<p>freeh: Err… NYU might have real estate, but that’s not the same thing as an endowment. You’re not really making that much money on real estate, especially when you’re using them as academic facilities… Pretty much Columbia & Yale and all the Ivies have WAY more money than NYU, so it’s more like NYU can’t compete on that factor.</p>
<p>NYU was pretty much a regional school until the '80s or so. My dad still thinks NYU is a lower tier school because when he got his PhD, it was. Only within the last 10-15 years has it become a national school of any fame.</p>
<p>Actually, Columbia doesn’t have that much more money than NYU… it’s just that NYU has many more students to spend it on. (I think I saw somewhere that Columbia only had about three to four billion compared to NYU’s two to three billion.) And it’s Harvard with the 21 billion dollar endowment, by the way. Yale comes in second, with… something in the low teens, last I heard.</p>
<p>Haha, and I’m talking about billions of dollars as if they were nothing…</p>