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outwest
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Posted: Mon Jun 2nd, 2008 05:05 am |
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When my last D was looking at various college one of the first things I did was look at the colleges endowment per student. I did it with the idea that she needed FA and a better endowed college would be more able to help her out in that way. But, I also looked because a college that manages its finances well usually translates to more experiences for their students. She chose Bryn Mawr, which has an endowment of $654.7 million as of 5/07 for just under 1700 students (undergraduates and graduates). I think that is a very healthy amount and hope it translates to opportunities for her.
For example, she received an invitation to apply for a one week leadership institute the week before school starts. Tuition, room and board is free for the program which includes an equal number of incoming students from Swarthmore, Haverford and Bryn Mawr. The conference is on race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, power and priviledge and it is hoped they will 'become agents of change'. When it is over she would be taken to her dorm room and have opportunities for exploring for the two days before the rest of the freshman come. I don't know if she will apply (she is mulling it over), but the program sounds great and is not just for minorities, but for a mix of students.
This is just the sort of thing I was thinking of when I was thinking of a college with a healthy endowment. That isn't to say that a college with a smaller endowment couldn't be just as good, but if they didn't have the money to feed and house the students and pay multiple speakers they couldn't offer something like this, right?
Here is a great data set of the top endowments per student. Keep in mind that this data is three years old and things change. There doesn't seem to be anything more current on the web, just lists with selected colleges only or straight endowment numbers which are misleading because they don't take into account the number of students. The liberal arts colleges do very well. Stanford is ahead of all the others (in 2005) by a good amount with Harvard coming in fourth. And, guess who's fifth? I won't tell, you have to look....... Surprised?  :
http://www.data360.org/graph_group.aspx?Graph_Group_Id=604
Last edited on Mon Jun 2nd, 2008 05:24 am by outwest
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Descartes
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Posted: Mon Jun 2nd, 2008 02:12 pm |
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Wikipedia has an article on college endowments. The middle table includes per student calculations as of 2006
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._colleges_and_universities_by_endowment
I suspect the difference in this source and the previous is over whether or not graduate students are included in the totals.
The "official" NACUBO list of endowments is here:
http://www.nacubo.org/documents/research/All%20Institutions%20Listed%20by%20FY%202007%20Market%20Value%20of%20Endowment%20Assets_2007%20NES.pdf
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CarolynLawrence
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Posted: Mon Jun 2nd, 2008 05:11 pm |
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I think the key question is not so much the size of the endowment, or the endowment per student, but how the income from the endowment is being used. A number of colleges and universities have large endowments, but don't necessarily translate that into things that make a difference in terms of financial aid, scholarships, and the educational experience.
Perhaps a more important indicator for prospective students is how well the college is doing at balancing its books year-to-year. If a college is running a deficit year-to-year or cutting things close, that makes me nervous because that is when you are likely to start to see cut-backs on financial aid, student services and faculty. Of course, schools with a larger endowment can weather financial uncertainty better, but in reality most colleges do not like to have to tap into their endowment principal to pay the bills.
Other indicators that I would look at in shopping for colleges is whether the college has been able to maintain the size of its student body with some consistency (not just that application numbers are going up -- but rather that students are actually choosing to enroll), the college's long range strategic plan for itself, bond ratings, whether the school is drawing a regional or national student body, and even, to a certain extent, how its competitors are doing at drawing students. The size of the endowment is just a piece of the puzzle.
Last edited on Mon Jun 2nd, 2008 05:13 pm by CarolynLawrence
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DesperateDad
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Posted: Mon Jun 2nd, 2008 05:54 pm |
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| The other question one needs to ask is how much of that endowment is being spent on undergrads as opposed to funding tuition/stipends for grad students.
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Consolation
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Posted: Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 01:08 am |
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When I read these tables I am amazed anew by Grinnell's decision to raise their tuition, and by the relatively high $ in loans their students graduate with.
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CarolynLawrence
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Posted: Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 05:30 am |
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In another thread, Mrs. Aardvark pointed out that the website http://www.collegeresults.org lists educational expenditures per student, efined as expenditures per student for instructional, student services, and academic support. That may be a somewhat more useful indicator than the endowment per student, for the reasons discussed above. Of course, you do have to allow something for geographic cost of living differences which may affect faculty costs.
Some interesting comparisons:
Swarthmore: $39,750
Haverford: $31,584
Carleton: $29,877
Middlebury: $36,857
Macalester: $24,430
Last edited on Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 05:39 am by CarolynLawrence
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outwest
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Posted: Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 07:14 am |
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After looking at a bunch of schools, all five of those schools have unusually high expenditures per student. That source is interesting and fun to compare the schools, but it seems like there are so many variable that you have to be careful putting too much stock in all those numbers. It is a good starting place, though.
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InterestedDad
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Posted: Wed Jun 4th, 2008 05:21 am |
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CarolynLawrence wrote: In another thread, Mrs. Aardvark pointed out that the website http://www.collegeresults.org lists educational expenditures per student, efined as expenditures per student for instructional, student services, and academic support.
There is so much variation in the budget categories used by colleges to report their expenses, that this "instructional and academic support" category is all but useless.
Pick any two or three schools, study their annual financial reports, and you'll instantly see the problem with this comparison.
The only safe number to consider is total operating expense per student. This is a pretty "clean" comparable number for LACs where all the spending is focused on undergrads. It's a messy number for universities, impossible to parse out undergrad spending.
The top LACs are currently spending in the $70,000 to $80,000 per student per year range (not including financial aid). This, of course, includes everything: fertilizer for the shrubs to heating costs. The killer number is the labor cost. Colleges are labor intensive to the extreme.
On the original topic: if I had to choose a college with absolutely zero information except for one permitted stat, it would be "per student endowment". That's basically the whole enchilada. If one college has an endowment of $800,000 per student and another of $200,000 per student, you would have to have a pretty convincing reason to not go to the school with the larger financial resources (assuming an acceptance letter and equal aid packages from both, of course). Having said that, I also concur with Carolyn's list of additional indicators.
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Consolation
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Posted: Wed Jun 4th, 2008 01:55 pm |
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Fooling around with the stats on that website is fascinating. The low graduation rates of many schools--even 6-year rates, which I personally consider reasonable--is troubling to me (and hearkens back to that article about lack of success on the part of many students that we discussed recently). You can compare male URM graduation rates to male white gradutation rates, and find a significant gap at some places. Also female/male.
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CarolynLawrence
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Posted: Wed Jun 4th, 2008 10:43 pm |
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What's also interesting on that site is the ability to sort out transfer rates for individual schools. It was interesting to see how many schools have transfer rates higher than 20%. I am wondering if you could somehow use that data to get a rough estimate of student satisfaction, by comparing transfer rates with the percentage who don't graduate. Do you think a school with a larger transfer rate is probably a better indicator of satisfaction than just the percentage who don't graduate (which includes many reasons)?
Regarding Graduation rates, here's some interesting data from a new US Dept of Ed report:
Percentage of students attending 4-year colleges who complete a bachelor's degree:
All 4-year institutions: 57.5
Public institutions: 54.8%
Private: 64.5%
Degree completion among different racial groups:
Hispanic students: 49.1%
At public: 46%
At private: 59%
African American: 42.1%
At public: 40.8
At private: 45.9%
Asian: 66.7%
At public: 64%
At private: 75.2%
White, non-hispanic: 60.2%
At Public: 57.1%
At private: 67%
Graduation, by time to degree:
Total Public Private
4-year grad 36.1% 29% 50.3%
5-year grad. 52.6% 49% 60.8%
6-year grad. 57.5% 54.8% 64.5%
Men
4-year 31% 23.6% 46%
5-year 49% 44.8% 58.5%
6-year 54.3% 51.3% 61.7%
Women
4-year 40.2% 33.5% 53.7%
5-year 55.6% 52.7% 62.7%
6-year 60.2% 57.7% 66.7%
Of course, some of the differences in time to degree between men and women can be attributed to men being more likely to major in engineering (which often takes longer), but certainly not all.
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