From “Endowments widen a higher education gap,” by Karen W. Arenson, New York TimesBut now look at the bottom graph. The scales are wildly different. The average endowment of public universities that fall in the 10-20th percentile looks to be about $13,000. The average endowment of private universities that fall in the 10-20th percentile looks to be nearly $100,000. Why does this matter?
Universities use income from their endowments primarily to support scholarships and educational opportunities for students and to provide research support for faculty. A 10-fold difference in endowment per student means a 10-fold difference in the amount of institutional support available for university programs that benefit each student.3 As Arenson puts it in the Times article,
The result is that America's already stratified system of higher education is becoming ever more so...the growth alone in Harvard's endowment last year was $5.7 billion – a sum bigger than all but 14 other universities' total endowments.
Modern teaching, research, and scholarship is very expensive. Few would argue that students benefit when courses must enroll several hundred to balance course demand with available faculty. “Experiential learning” and “problem-based teaching” are difficult if not impossible in such settings. The best teaching integrates technology into lectures, assignments, and laboratories. But neither faculty nor technology comes cheap. Wealthy universities provide their students with opportunities that their poor cousins can barely imagine.
The same differences arise in research and scholarship. A single scientific instrument may cost several hundred thousand dollars, historians must travel to distant archives for long periods of time, and anthropologists often spend months or years in remote areas in order to understand the cultures they study. Universities encourage research and scholarship both because they are committed to advancing knowledge and because they recognize that active scholars are often the most effective teachers. Again, wealthy universities provide their faculty with research support that helps their faculty do more than those of us at less privileged institutions.
Resources mean opportunities. That's why U.S. News & World Report includes “financial resources” among the indicators it uses to choose America's Best Colleges.
Does the inequality matter? I'm convinced that bright, committed students receive an excellent education at the University of Connecticut. But with Harvard's endowment growth each year providing it with more than ten times the resources we have available through our endowment,4 the disparity may become so great that even the most dedicated and resourceful faculty are no longer able to overcome it.
1The most recent year for which I could find information on the Office of Institutional Research's website.
216,347 undergraduate students; 7210 graduate and professional students
3It's not an across the board benefit, because donors typically direct their contributions o particular programs. As a result, even within the same university the amount of income available for support may differ dramaticaly from program to program.
4UConn is, of course, a public institution. But state support for public higher education is declining in every part of the country, and Connecticut is no exception. At one time state support might have substituted for an endowment, but if that was ever true, it isn't true any more. Even great public universities like the University of California, Berkeley (which has a $3 billion endowment) are feeling the pinch. Harvard added more to its endowment last year than UC Berkeley has.
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