OT: RU Endowment Size Increases To $1.33B
- Thread starter bigmatt718
- Start date
ONE of the reasons. I will go with that.
But will not say it is the singular reason.
Endowment is critical. With some bizarre exceptions (eg, St Oaf, a quality regional college in MN, though hardly a household brand nationally, has a $450M+ endowment) , endowment size has a definite correlation to how the quality of a school is perceived (whether they know of the endowment or not by perspective students and their families, the "rankings" (eg US News, etc.) (which are a bit silly) and, most significantly, the top employers and grad professional schools. As referenced, it's not shocking that tiny (under 2000 students and no grad or professional schools), but prestigious, Amherst and Williams Colleges - each has a $2B+ endowment. The endowment of school reflects financial health in general not just founds given and remaining in the endowment - schools with large endowments also typically have creature comforts and summer internships paid by the colleges themselves often in fields selected by students themselves that others don't which makes these schools attractive to those who don't have to choose schools based on tuition size and available financial aid - ie,, the rich get richer.
I vaguely remember looking at a book in the Douglass library ~1986? that had RU LAST in the country.
For many, having the bank to attend private schools in the first place makes for more ability to donate...
I disagree somewhat . In basketball, we stunk in the Atlantic 10 and big east . I don’t think those schools had much bigger endowments than us.
In football, we didn’t exactly kill it in the Big east. And we got run over in the AAC.
I think the reason why we have stunk is because of bad choices. Most of which were epically bad: littlepage, bannon, hill, rice , Jordan, Shea, flood, pernetti, ash.
You're right, but a school can't make good choices without having money to make them with. Otherwise the only choices the school has are bad.
Right. That is kinda what I’m saying.
They weren’t poor hires just because of money.
There are still some (not as many I hope) who think if you hang a B1G shingle out front people will just show up. It didn’t work when we finally got into the Big East so why would it work now?
Of course $ matters in sports - we have been awful in MBB forever (I was at the final 4 in '76 - it's been a while) - is it a coincidence that we are the only team pretty much anywhere among P5 that lacks (until soon) a practice facility? How many baseball NCAAs have we made - is it a coincidence that we play in a glorified HS ballpark. Tennis has one or two wins total in Big 10 and I don't believe any wins over top 25 programs ever - our facilities are bad for DIII let alone P5 - and on and on.
Which is why we should pull the plug.
Should have been one of the original chopping block victims.
I don’t think the endowment mattered much when losing in the a 10 and big east. The endowment didn’t make Eddie Jordan lazy and it didn’t make rice throw basketballs at players .
Bad decisions hiring and retaining crappy coaches .
A bigger endowment would hopefully make it easier to correct those mistakes.
The trick is to not continue to make them after your bank account improves.
Maybe . But it doesn’t explain why our players and teams have stunk compared to schools in the same league . It doesn’t explain why we have whiffed on every hire, save for schiano, for the past 35 years. . These are indefensible facts and makes you wonder if we would ever spend money wisely? The facts point to no.
I’ll go with almost all.
Goodale
Brecht
Stringer
O’Neill
Civico
~Hill Sr.
That being said since it is such a short list I will continue to do what I always do...hope.
None of those coaches are football or men’s basketball. Those are the sports that matter in big time athletics. I am not saying that’s right but just the way it is.
It’s about bad hires but it goes further up. It’s due to a string of bad, ineffective ADs with no experience and no business being ADs. They in turn make bad decisions and hire coaches who stink.
Yes money matters - of course it does. But it’s not the endowment which doesn’t go towards athletics. Explain why the entire SEC save for Vandy and Florida have smaller endowments than us. Tell me hownthat’s hurting them.
Yep.
That’s why I agreed with another poster in a different thread which said Rutgers problems were all their own doing.
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Ok, but football and men’s basketball matter much more than others. You can tell by the BTN coverage. That’s just the way it is.
Of course there is a hierarchy. We know how the world works....because $$$. They bring the most in, they get the most back.
Private universities versus state universities and endowments.
If you compare the 3 large state universities in Pennsylvania, Penn State, Temple and Pitt, Penn State (student body 90,000) has the largest endowment at $4.26 billion.
However, both Temple (student body 40,000) and Pitt (student body 35,000) were initially both Private Universities but both became Pennsylvania state related universities in 1966. Significant differences in endowment with Temple at $0.64 billion and Pitt at $4.20 billion. Many other factors play a role in endowment size.
Carnegie Mellon University (Private and founded by Andrew Carnegie) has an endowment of $2.38 billion.
HAIL TO PITT!!!!
If you compare the 3 large state universities in Pennsylvania, Penn State, Temple and Pitt, Penn State (student body 90,000) has the largest endowment at $4.26 billion.
However, both Temple (student body 40,000) and Pitt (student body 35,000) were initially both Private Universities but both became Pennsylvania state related universities in 1966. Significant differences in endowment with Temple at $0.64 billion and Pitt at $4.20 billion. Many other factors play a role in endowment size.
Carnegie Mellon University (Private and founded by Andrew Carnegie) has an endowment of $2.38 billion.
HAIL TO PITT!!!!
The actual answer is they invest it. If they spend it, it is no longer part of the endowment. The goal is to have an endowment large enough that you can spend the investment returns while still growing the endowment. That also gives the university a better credit rating, allowing them to borrow money at lower interest rates.
Just think what our endowment be if we regularly went to the dance and bowl games. Regularly ranked. It has been proven by academic studies that more winning translates to more giving.
At least some of the Yale faculty do not like the Yale model. They say that the school should regard "intellectual capital" as being at least as important as "financial capital" and therefore money should be spent now for the sake of the school being better in the future. The governing board does not like this idea one bit, and it's not hard to imagine why.
About 12-13 years ago, in sort of a preview of the 2017 tax on Yale scale endowments, Sen. Grassley held hearings on whether the private foundation rules should be extended to colleges & universities. Those rules require 5% of the endowment, valued annually, be spent each year on current expenses. This would be done to discourage "endowment hoarding" and hopefully hold down tuition increases. The colleges opposed it, obviously, and hiked financial aid packages to head it off. Then came the "Great Recession" and it was buried.
I like that plan more than the 2017 tax, though I suspect some faculty would grouse that it's not 100%.
size of endowment is important, but size per student is the more telling statistic. Lehigh's blows rutgers away in the size/student metric.
IMO
Two things also seem to be pretty likely:
-Their families have more money to give
-The school was their first choice and they had a sense of pride in being able to have gone there.
Rutgers, for better or worse, is in an affluent area where a large chunk of kids grow up dreaming of those private schools, not RU.
To piggy back on your earlier point, I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant portion is just affluent families continually buying their way into these elite schools.
That doesn’t change the fact that Rutgers is horrible in terms of customer service. That is one of the reasons our alumni giving rate is so low.
I don't disagree, other than to say pretty much every large institution is bad at customer service on some level. RU also has the bad luck to be in the center of known universe when it comes to complaining, so that doesn't help.
Maybe. But take Rutgers out of the equation for a minute, because this isn’t a Rutgers-only issue. Aside from a few key public universities such as Meechigan, Texas and the like, public universities lag behind their private counterparts greatly. A typical state U has 3-4x the number of students a private one has.
