56 Colleges Have Endowments Topping $1B

[OC Mustang]

Phil Bennett's Moustache wrote:

what are you referring to? why do you put Harvard and Yale in with these 8? they are at the top of the list, and the 8 you listed just joined. they are also among the oldest universities in the country, versus SMU and Baylor, relatively 'new' universities by comparison. your "analysis" makes absolutely no sense to me. by what standard are you comparing these schools?

Yeah, I got mixed up because I got in a hurry reading the post that contained that list of schools. Didn't stop to think. I missed the part that they were the NEW billion dollar bunch. I put Harvard and Yale in thinking that I needed to include them too. I thought about it again when I got to thinking of UT and A&M. They had billion dollar endowments and then some. Just didn't make sense. However, I had already posted, and I do not know how to edit. Boy I feel stupid. Sorry.

[/quote]

[originaloverthehilltop1]

somebody check and tell me if i have this right:

1 billion divided by (less than) 6k undergrads = $166,000/per undergrad student.

$166,666 x .09 earnings = $15,000 per student income every year, not including tuition and fees, govt grants (and that's a lot) and other income received. nor annual sustentation additions.

i think all those buildings and museums are specific donations, are they included in endowment figures?

as a forbes article pointed out a few years back, major universities in this country are looking more like a fund management firm with education as aa sideline.

admittedly not including grad student population here, but other than keeping up with the academic joneses, how many billions do we need to serve such a small constituency of students?

does a school our size have to be in the top 20 in this category? top 30?

and oh, yeah. a billion bucks in the bank and we can't even get a face lift for moody, 20 years overdue?

how's that for devils advocacy?

[SMU Football Blog]

My father in law chairs the board of a university endowment (not SMU and not in Texas). What you are saying causes him to go into an apoplectic fit.

Schools typically try and spend about 5% of the endowment a year and hope the rest grows at a rate to at least sustain the endowment at the current level, and more likely grow it. Bare in mind most endowments lost a lot of money a few years ago when the tech bubble burst.

The endowment is $1B. 5% of that is $50 million. The school budget is over $350,000,000.00 this year. Do the math. SMU is not going to dip into the endowment to put a new facade on Moody.

[originaloverthehilltop1]

i understand the reasoning behind not using endowment to renew a building that should have been done years ago. the question is, how many billions are needed to support a school of maybe 8000 students, including graduate?

at $350 mil budget, thats still spending $43,000 per student. and my point is, the only measurement we seem to use is how much harvard or tcu or somebody else has and its estimated that harvard now has enough money that they could quit charging tuition and never run out.

at least we are still semi-private (tho we still take taxpayer money, and all we can get, from research grants, subsized student loans, etc). the only thing i object to is that no one ever answers the question: how much is enough? "no matter how much, its never enough" is a perenial bureaucratic answer.

[abezontar]

seeing how the campus appears to continually be growing, and our freshman classes are (or at least were) getting larger every year, I would think that the administration is attempting to expand the size of the university, in that vein the endowment would need to expand as well in order to support a larger school. In my opinion you don't want to stop growing the endowment until you want to stop growing and improving the university, and I doubt that will ever happen.

[Cheesesteak]

Posted by abezontar:

In my opinion you don't want to stop growing the endowment until you want to stop growing and improving the university, and I doubt that will ever happen.

Even if a university decided to stop growing or foolishly decided to stop improving...(it would) never stop (trying to grow) growing the endowment...unless it was planning to close in the near future.

[SoCal_Pony]

Rumor is our endowment is getting ready to grow by $33,000,000.....

Nice Job of Reporting FriarWolf

[Cheesesteak]

Posted by SoCal_Pony:

Nice Job of Reporting FriarWolf

Yes, well done friarwolf!

Go SMU!

[friarwolf]

Thanks, SoCal....