Worlds Top-25 Universities- Massive Accumulation Of Endowment Wealth
Worlds Top-25 Universities- Massive Accumulation Of Endowment Wealth
An assessment carried out by AllAboutUni.com reveals that a massive accumulation of endowment wealth has been put together by the World’s Top25 universities 1. AllAboutUni.com is an independent global and interactive website where visitors can obtain information about universities global rankings student reviews university news and campus pictures.
The Worlds Top25 universities in 2008 click here are mainly located in the United States 18 out of 25 and are often private institutions 11 out of 25. This distribution is more pronounced for the Worlds Top10 universities where 8 out of 10 are located in the United States US and 7 out of 10 are private institutions.
Total endowments for each of the universities were collected from Wikipedia.org accessed on 29 October 2008 and nonUS endowments were converted into US dollars exchange rate of 29 October 2008. The endowments of two universities were not available: the University of Tokyo in Japan ranked 19th and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in Switzerland ranked jointly 24th. The analysis is therefore based on 23 universities 18 from the US and 5 from other countries United Kingdom 3 Canada and Japan and is a conservative estimate.
The total endowment of the 23 universities was 170.2 billion and ranged from 172 million University College London in the UK ranked 22nd to 36.9 billion Harvard University in the US ranked 1st. The median endowment is 5.9 billion with universities in the US having higher endowments median of 6.1 billion range 471 million to 36.9 billion than those in the other countries median of 2.2 billion range 172 million to 3.4 billion.
Four private universities in the US had 56 of the total endowment wealth of the World’s Top25 universities: Harvard University 36.9 billion 22 Yale University 22.9 billion 14 Stanford University 17.2 billion 10 and Princeton University 17 billion 10. It is therefore no surprise that the private universities in the US have higher endowments median of 7.2 billion than the public universities in the US median of 1.3 billion.
This accumulation of wealth by the World’s Top25 universities is quite astonishing. For example the total wealth accumulated by the World’s Top25 universities is greater than the budget of the State of California 111 billion in 200809 or it places these universities 41st in the country ranking of Gross Domestic Product GDP according to the International Monetary Fund in front of Nigeria Romania and Israel. The accumulation of endowment wealth by universities has both positive and negative sides. A large university endowment supports the operating budget of the university and gives the university greater independence and resources which can be used for example to establish new research institutes or to fund scholarships. In the fiscal year 2008 distributions from the Harvard University endowment totalled 1.6 billion contributing more than one third of the university’s operating budget in addition to supporting substantial capital outlays.
There are also a number of negative sides associated with large university endowments. One of these is that it gives the university an image of accumulating too much wealth and being greedy. Another is that it leads to criticism about the allocation of the endowment income for example Harvard University could allow its students to attend for free for just 300 million which is a fraction of the 2008 endowment income. Finally it makes it impossible for other less well endowed universities around the world to compete on an even playing field with universities that have established very large endowments.
Background note: 1 The analysis is based on a ranking of the Worlds Top500 Universities produced by the Institute of Higher Education at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Several indicators of academic or research performance are used to establish the ranking these include staff winning Nobel Prizes highly cited researchers and articles indexed in major citation indices. The rankings have been published since 2003 with the 2008 ranking published on 15 August 2008.
About the writer: AllAboutUni.com was founded by John Paget and launched in November 2007. He has been visiting university campuses around the world since the 1980s and wanted to share this information with others. John Paget was brought up in Switzerland where he attended the International School of Geneva and was exposed to the growing demand for international higher education studies. John Paget studied Economics at the London School of Economics and then completed graduate studies in the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
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