You were looking for good news, right? Here it is: Harvard still has $36.6 billion remaining in its endowment. Feel better? Oh, sorry.

In Harvard’s defense, the administration says that much of that money is restricted, perhaps even most of it. Plus, lots belongs to folks at the specialty schools, like law, business, education, architecture, etc. So, it’s not like Harvard President Larry Summers can spend that money like he wants, say, like Citibank tried to last week . . . on a 45 million dollar jet. Does John Thain run Citi? I guess not. Well, at least he could offer decorate the plane.

Anyway, as a lot of you already knew, Summers isn’t at Harvard, as he got canned from Harvard’s top job for lack of political correctness. A Clinton-administration re-tread, Larry’s landed on his ample feet as chief economic advisor to President Obama.

But anyway, Harvard is trailed by Yale who’s only got $23 billion in its coffers. Texas, floating from a brief fling with high oil prices, is the fifth best endowed school in the nation, with $16 billion. Texas schools’ endowments always surge with oil prices, as they sit on so much oil company stock and assorted other less marketable oil assets, like leasehold interests. Texas A&M is #10 in endowment with $6.7 billion.

Out of the top 50 best endowed colleges in the nation, only five are in the South: University of Virginia, Emory, Duke, Vanderbilt and the University of North Carolina.

The entire concept of VALUE, however, is based on relationships, what is RELATIVE. Thus, one might argue, the best measure of endowment is how much money a university has for each student that it must “support”. Viewed in that way, the numbers change. Here are the best endowed colleges and universities in the country, based on the funds that they have per student. Obviously, a smaller endowment in support of a small student body will change the rank of a college.

1. Princeton
2. Bryn Athyn
3. Yale
4. Rice
5. Harvard
6. Olin Engineering
7. Grinnell
8. Stanford
9. Pomona
10. Swarthmore
11. MIT
12. Amherst

Princeton’s got $2 million for each student!

And high schools, you ask? The Kamehameha Schools in, where else, Hawaii, boast over $7 billion of endowment and the Milton Hershey School has nearly $8 billion. MHS was founded in 1909 to care for “white orphan boys”, and now is non-discriminatory, caring for 1,700 kids, kindergarten through 12th grade.

Wanna help kids? Go buy a Hershey bar. Plus, over the past 12 months, Hershey stock is up 5%, while the Dow is down 34%+. The kids are doing okay.

Less well-heeled are the five next richest schools: Exeter, Andover, St. Paul’s, Hotchkiss and Deerfield, all New England boarding schools. Those five average $600 million in endowment and average 770 students each, resulting in a per student endowment among these five stars of $780,000.

Harvard, with nearly 30,000 students total undergraduate and graduate, has nearly $1.2 million of endowment for each student; and, although in terms of room, board, tuition etc. it costs about $47,000 to attend, that seems not to diminish the world’s enthusiasm for the place, as the Cambridge, Massachusetts university gets around 25,000 undergrad applications each year for its 2,000 places.

This entry was posted 2 years, 9 months ago on Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Articles, 2009, May.

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