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Memoirs of a SLACer

sociological views on life and the liberal arts

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Are the richest schools the “best” schools?

February 27, 2014 by John

US News Ranking by Endowment Ranking

The other day I was having a conversation with a colleague about how much size matters to US News. That is, how closely correlated are US News rankings of national liberal arts schools with the size of their endowments? Since both the rankings and the size of endowments are available on the US News website, I decided to take a look. (Note that I don’t actually have any software for statistical analysis at home, so everything that follows will be very basic.)

The first thing I did was create a list of the top 99 schools (there were several schools at #100, so I decided to go with 99 instead of 104 or whatever it would have been) with their rankings and the size of their endowments and then order the list by endowment size and re-rank the schools in order to determine the difference between US News rank and endowment rank. On average, the US News rankings differed from the endowment rankings by just -.48, meaning that the average school is ranked about a half a position lower than its endowment would suggest.

Considering that raw endowment amounts may not be as important as endowment per student, I did the same analysis again but divided the endowment by the total number of students. The result was the same: -.48. In both cases, though, the standard deviation was large. For raw endowment, the standard deviation was 18.66, while for enrollment-adjusted endowment it was 20.99.

I also looked at the schools with the best and worst rankings relative to their endowments. The winners were the US Air Force Academy (ranked 65 spots above the location that its 90th-ranked endowment would suggest) and the US Military Academy (46 spots above its 63rd-ranked endowment). The losers were Berea College (65 spots below its 11th-ranked endowment) and Agnes Scott College (37 spots below its 52nd-ranked endowment).

Finally, I took a look at the correlation coefficients. Pearson’s r for the raw endowment was .78, while for enrollment-adjusted endowment it was .72. In both cases, there is a strong correlation between endowment and US News rankings. This isn’t particularly surprising, given that a large endowment makes a school more able to do the things that US News values while drawing the types of students that US News values. It does, however, point out that, in many cases, US News rankings don’t provide much information beyond what we could ascertain by glancing at the endowments of two schools.

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Posted in Popular Press, SLAC, Social Economics, The Ivory Tower | Tagged Endowment Size, Memoirs of a SLACer, US News Rankings | 6 Comments

6 Responses

  1. on March 16, 2014 at 9:19 pm “We’re not an R1, so…”: Under the SLAC umbrella | Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] I regularly teach more students per semester than friends who teach four. Despite this, my school does not have the resources of those in the top 100 national liberal arts schools (whether sorted by US News ranking or […]


  2. on March 27, 2014 at 9:04 pm On the market again | Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] interviews and even campus interviews. The school where I accepted a job is more highly ranked (for whatever that’s worth) than the school where I currently work and I applied to a large number of schools between these […]


  3. on April 1, 2014 at 9:20 pm From small to selective | Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] the institution that recently hired me. At the most basic level, this means that my new institution has a lot more financial resources. These resources translate into a higher salary and lower teaching load (3-2). I am told that my […]


  4. on April 6, 2014 at 9:00 pm Money vs. mission | Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] higher education in the next few decades. Answers to these questions differed dramatically based on the institution’s financial stability. Those at wealthier schools focused on their vision for the college and ways that they were trying […]


  5. on June 9, 2015 at 9:28 pm Colleges and universities can’t have it both ways | Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] are associated, somebody must assume, with more prestige (even if this is more closely related to endowments), making our institutions worth the high cost of attendance. I would argue, though, that […]


  6. on September 13, 2015 at 9:06 pm US News liberal arts rankings vs. teaching rankings | Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] may recall that the overall rankings for national liberal arts institutions are strongly correlated with endowments. Apparently, the things that make a school good at teaching in the eyes of US […]



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