Quote:
Originally Posted by oldu
The Sunday New York Times had an interesting story in its education section which listed college endowments in terms of $/student instead of totals. It was astonishing that 12 schools have endowments of almost ONE MILLION DOLLARS OR MORE PER STUDENT! Tops with over two million was Princeton, followed by Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Pomona, Grinnel, Amherst, Swarthmore, M.I.T., Rice, Williams and Cal Tech. That relates to $30,000-50,000 per student in annual endowment income. By the way, tuition at all of the above is also in excess of $30,000 annually. It would be interesting to see fraternity and sorority endowment figures the same way to determine how much of the cost of today's Greek membership is subsidized by those who preceded them. It might be a good selling point.
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This isn't where oldu meant to take this story, but I happened to see a recruitment letter to my high school junior daughter lying by the computer as I read his post. I don't want my post to be construed as putting in a plug for Yale (and I understand other expensive private universities have recently adopted similar tuition policies), but I quote from the letter:
"In January [2008], we announced dramatic improvements to our financial aid policies. . . Families with annual incomes under $60,000 are no longer asked to contribute to the cost of sending a child to Yale. Those with incomes between $60,000 and $120,000 will pay from 1% to 9% of their annual income, and families from $120,000 to $200,000 will pay an average of 10% of income."
With endowments like that, it is easy to see why the universities could afford to subsidize tuition based on financial need. It looks like they are putting those resources to good use. Of course it will already make a very competitive admission process that much more competitive!