This list of US colleges and universities by endowment contains the 56 universities in the United States that have an endowment of at least 1 billion US dollars (at fiscal year-end 2005). For a sense of the scale of the largest U.S. university endowments: the endowment of Harvard is approximately the same size as the annual GDP of Lithuania, Yale's endowment is approximately the same size as Panama's annual GDP and Stanford's endowment is slightly larger than the annual GDP of Uzbekistan. The top-five endowments combined as an annual national GDP would fall somewhere between the annual GDP of Peru and Kuwait.

*Denotes the aggregate of a cluster of institutions (university system).

Largest endowments per student (2004)

While total endowment size is a useful measurement of the wealth of a university, it is not necessarily the best means of comparing the financial resources of different universities because it does not take the size of the institution into account. For example, Emory's endowment may be more than 4 times larger than Smith's, but Emory's endowment also has to support more than 4 times as many students. As a result, the two schools have about the same amount of money to spend per student from their endowments. That being said, comparing the size of endowments per student can misrepresent the resources of smaller colleges because large universities can take better advantage of economies of scale and are generally able to get better returns on their investments. Notably, with the exception of the graduate-only medical school University of California, San Francisco, every institution in the top 50 is private.

References

• Yale Posts Highest Endowment Returns, Topping Stanford, Harvard (November 22, 2005). Bloomberg.com.
• 2005 National Association of College and University Business Officers Endowment Study (PDF)
• Colleges/Universities: Endowment per Student for 2004