A Matter of Endowment
[#permalink]
12 Aug 2010, 20:39
A somewhat useful measure of the ability of a schools ability of a school to finance new facilities, faculty members, and programs is its endowment. To be clear, this is a limited metric and one should also consider that public institutions have a "shadow" endowment of sorts in the tax base of the government (although one might question how deep this pocket actually is, especially for governments that are facing financial crisis). As usual, one should keep in mind that the value of these funds could change quickly, both in terms of gains/loss and the results of development programs. One could also contemplate the use of per capita metrics, but many of the benefits of endowments probably do not suffer from congestion.
Consider, for example, the business school endowments or Ultra Elite schools in USD with the 2009 endowment for the institution from NACUBO/Commonfund in parentheses. Note how Penn, Chicago, Northwestern all have similar institutional endowments. Note how Harvard's endowment dominates the group, nearly three times the nearest rival and bigger than the next three largest UE endowments combined.
MIT Sloan: 515MM (8.0B)
Columbia: 356MM (5.9B)
Northwestern Kellogg: 556MM (5.4B)
Penn Wharton: 656MM (5.2B)
Stanford: 755MM (12.6B)
Chicago Booth: 389MM (5.1B)
HBS: ~ 2100MM (26.0B)
The endowments of most of the Elite cluster schools are significantly smaller, although Yale SOM has an endowment larger than two of the UE schools and UVA Darden comes close.
Virginia Darden: 276MM
Duke Fuqua: 174MM (4.4B)
Yale: 444MM (16.3B)
UC Berkeley Haas: 177MM (4.9B UC system)
Cornell: 187MM (4.0B)
Dartmouth Tuck: 196MM (2.8B)
UCLA Anderson: 84MM (4.9B UC system)
Trans Elite
UNC CH Kenan Flagler 120MM
Emory Goizueta 84MM