Skip to main content

Endowment Data from 847 Colleges and Universities

The 2014 NACUBO report on college and university endowments is hot off the presses.  Unfortunately, it's in a table in a pdf on the organization's website.  So, after considerable frustration to get the data into useable format, it's now visualized here for you.

Note that there are three different views, and you can change them by clicking the tabs across the top:

  1. Endowment Value Dashboard is a heat map, which is sort of like a pie chart, except it's like a sheet cake cut into pieces the size of the listed university endowment. The 847 institutions in the study collectively hold about $455B in endowment funds.  You can see the pieces of the cake: Harvard's for instance, is about $32B, or 7% of all the endowments of all the colleges and universities in the country. The pieces are colored by the percentage gain in one year.  For instance, Stanford gained $1.6B between 2012 and 2013, but the 10% increase only ranked it 483rd.  When you have a lot, you don't need a big increase to grow a lot.
  2. The Endowment Change Dashboard shows four variables: The rank of the percentage change along the x-axis and the rank of the value gained along the y-axis; the color shows the raw amount of the one-year change; and the size shows the relative value of the endowment at the end of 2013.
  3. The Value and Change Dashboard shows the 2013 value in the gray bar; the amount of change on the red, both on the top chart; and then the values and changes arrayed on the bottom.  Each of the two dot charts is colored by the rank of the other variable.
Confused? Good.  This is really intended to show a couple of things:
  • The (some might say) ridiculous range of endowment at institutions of higher learning in the US and Canada.  Note that even with relatively modest growth at the wealthiest institutions, six of them increased endowment by more than $1B in a year.  Only 83 institutions even have an endowment of $1B or more.
  • The absolute futility of trying to catch up, unless you're already in striking distance.
  • Never put your data in a table if you want it to be interesting
There's a lot of stuff here. And way more that could be done.  What do you see?



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Educational Attainment and the Presidential Elections

I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps these charts will show you why: We work and probably hang around mostly people with college degrees (or higher).  Our perception is limited. With the 2024 election data just out , I thought I'd take a look at the last three elections and see if the pattern I noticed in 2016 and 2020 held.  Spoiler: It did, mostly. Before you dive into this, a couple of tips: Alaska's data is always reported in a funky way, so just ignore it here.  It's a small state (in population, that is) and it's very red.  It doesn't change the overall trends even if I could figure out how to c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Changes in AP Scores, 2022 to 2024

Used to be, with a little work, you could download very detailed data on AP results from the College Board website: For every state, and for every course, you could see performance by ethnicity.  And, if you wanted to dig really deep, you could break out details by private and public schools, and by grade level.  I used to publish the data every couple of years. Those days are gone.  The transparency The College Board touts as a value seems to have its limits, and I understand this to some extent: Racists loved to twist the data using single-factor analysis, and that's not good for a company who is trying to make business inroads with under-represented communities as they cloak their pursuit of revenue as an altruistic push toward access. They still publish data, but as I wrote about in my last post , it's far less detailed; what's more, what is easily accessible is fairly sterile, and what's more detailed seems to be structured in a way that suggests the company doesn...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Highly Rejective Colleges

If you're not following Akil Bello on Twitter, you should be.  His timeline is filled with great insights about standardized testing, and he takes great effort to point out racism (both subtle and not-so-subtle) in higher education, all while throwing in references to the Knicks and his daughter Enid, making the experience interesting, compelling, and sometimes, fun. Recently, he created the term " highly rejective colleges " as a more apt description for what are otherwise called "highly selective colleges."  As I've said before, a college that admits 15% of applicants really has a rejections office, not an admissions office.  The term appears to have taken off on Twitter, and I hope it will stick. So I took a look at the highly rejectives (really, that's all I'm going to call them from now on) and found some interesting patterns in the data. Take a look:  The 1,132 four-year, private colleges and universities with admissions data in IPEDS are incl...
Post a Comment
Read more