Organic Benchmarks for University Endowments
Can a university’s characteristics be a better indicator of an endowment’s effectiveness than endowment size?
Organic benchmarks based on university characteristics – such as tuition discounts, per-student endowment, endowment payments to university budget, and total student enrollment – can be telling measures of endowment effectiveness. By comparing university goals with the use of endowment assets, this study shows that endowment size alone does not sufficiently measure endowment asset performance.
The author examined endowment performance at 898 universities between 2002 and 2014. Using data from NACUBO and the National Center for Education Statistics, he separated the universities into three groups based on endowment size and university characteristics to measure how effectively universities manage their endowment assets.
Cristian Ioan Tiu
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