The 50 richest private colleges are offering little relief to students during the pandemic
nstead of walking to class in one of Yale’s picturesque Gothic buildings, meeting friends in the library for group projects or discussing lectures face to face with guest speakers during the evening events that distinguish the Ivy League experience, most of junior Reilly Johnson’s education this fall takes place on a Zoom screen inside her off-campus apartment in New Haven, Connecticut.
Yale’s endowment has never been bigger, returning 6.8% in its fiscal year ending in June and growing to $31.2 billion, or about $2 million per full-time student. Harvard and Dartmouth’s endowments both are up better than 7% in that time, and Brown’s enjoyed a knockout year with a 12.1% return. But all of these schools and most of their peers, among elite colleges, have raised their prices during one of the worst recessions in history.
Fourteen of the 50 richest schools are freezing tuition at 2019’s rate, but no fewer than 30 are pressing forward with previously announced tuition hikes, shrugging off the pandemic.America's families are reeling from the Covid recession but that hasn't stopped many of America’s richest colleges from raising tuition rates for the 2020-21, even as classes go online.
That means that outside the select group of institutions with the largest cash piles, much of their financial aid is subsidized by wealthy families paying full tuition. Ehrenberg says tuition revenue accounts for 80% of Cornell’s financial aid costs. Cornell joined four of its Ivy League counterparts in raising tuition this year despite its $7.2 billion endowment, which falls just outside the top 50 on a per-student basis.
to offer free tuition to all 1,650 of its students. That’s a special case, but Georgetown, Johns Hopkins and Hampton, none of which have enough endowment dollars per student to crack the top 50, all one-upped most of their peer schools by cutting tuition this year.
“Part of the tuition is being around such smart people and having discussions and sections in person,” Kumar says. “It’s challenging to justify the same cost.”
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