New figures on university endowments confirm it’s not just the “haves” and “have nots” in academe these days. Beyond the great majority of colleges, there’s a growing group of the newly rich schools, and at the top of the heap a tiny cadre of ultra-wealthy institutions.
The latest endowment figures from NACUBO, a college business officers’ group, highlight the growing prosperity but also the stratification among elite universities. That development is creating tension.
There are now 76 colleges and universities with endowments that have passed $1 billion including 16 new members of that club like Georgetown and the Universities of Oklahoma and Missouri.
But five at the top each have nearly $6 billion more than any school outside that group: Harvard ($34.6 billion), Yale ($22.5 billion), Stanford ($17.2 billion), Princeton ($15.8 billion) and the University of Texas system ($15.6 billion). The survey marks the end of the most recent fiscal year, which at most schools ended last June 30, so the numbers don’t reflect the recent downturn in the stock market.
Among them, Harvard’s endowment the largest overall expanded by an amount last year that’s more than Ivy League rival Cornell has altogether. Princeton now has over $2 million in the bank for every student. Stanford raised nearly $1 billion during its last reported fiscal year alone.
There is a “tremendous dispersion in wealth from the people right at the top to the lesser ones,” said Dr. Ronald Ehrenberg, an expert on higher education economics at Cornell. “It falls off very, very quickly.”
The figures come at a time when the advantages of that small group of superrich schools have been a contentious topic.
