What use is a big endowment?

Quite a lot. But not as much as you might expect.

The website THEBESTSCHOOLS has just published a list of the world's 100 wealthiest universities, as measured by the value of their endowments. As expected, it is dominated by US institutions with Harvard in first place. There are also three universities from Canada and two each  from the UK, Australia, Japan, Singapore and Saudi Arabia

There are of course other elements in university funding but it worth looking at how this ranking compares with others. The top five are familiar to any rankings observer, Harvard with an endowment of 34.5 US$ followed by Yale, the University of Texas system, Stanford and Princeton. Then there is a surprise, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia in sixth place with an endowment of 20 billion.

Some of the wealthy universities also do well in other rankings. Stanford, in fourth place here, is second in the overall Shanghai rankings and seventh for publications, and fifth in the  Leiden Ranking default publications indicator. It does even better in the QS employer survey indicator, where it is ranked second.

There are, however, several places that are very wealthy but just don't get anywhere in the global rankings. Williams College, the University of Richmond, Pomona College, Wellesley College, Smith College, and Grinnell College are not even given a value in the QS employment indicator, or the Leiden or Shanghai publication indicators. They may of course do well in some other respects: the University of Richmond is reported by the Princeton Review to be second in the US for internships.

On the other hand, some less affluent universities do surprisingly well. Some California schools seem to among the best high-performers.  Caltech is 47th here but 9th in the Shanghai rankings where it has always been first in the productivity per capita indicator. Berkeley is 65th here and fifth in Shanghai. The University of California San Francisco, a medical school, is 90th here and 21st in Shanghai.

Overall there is an association between endowment value and research output or reputation among employers that is definitely positive but rather modest. The correlation  between endowment and Shanghai publication score is 0.38, between endowment and number of publications 2012-15 (in the Leiden Ranking) 0.46, and between endowment and the QS employer survey score 0.40. The relationship would certainly be higher if we corrected for restriction of range.

Having a lot of money helps a university produce research and build up a reputation for excellence but it is certainly not the only factor involved.

Here is the top ten in a a ranking of the 100 universities by papers (Leiden Ranking) per billion dollars of endowment.

1. University of Toronto
2. University of British Columbia
3. McGill University
4. University of California San Francisco
5. University of Melbourne
6. Rutgers University
7. UCLA
8. University of Florida
9. University of California Berkeley
10. University of Sydney.

When it comes to research value for money it looks as though Australian and Canadian universities and US state institutions are doing rather better than the Ivy League or Oxbridge.