If Ivies were countries
It looks like eliminating hot breakfasts and launching an expensive clothing line paid off for Harvard.
Harvard’s endowment recovered 11% this year after a disastrous 27.3% tumble last year. The endowment now stands at $27.4 billion, up from last year’s $26 billion figure.
I am an EALAC major who can’t do math, so this information is meaningless to me.
$26 billion sounds like a lot of money. $27.4 billion sounds like even more money. And Columbia’s humble endowment of $5.4 billion sounds like a little less money. But they’re all variations on the theme of a lot of money.
So to understand what all these numbers mean, I need to convert them into terms I understand.
What if Ivy League universities were countries, and their endowments were GDPs? This is an idiotic question. But it’s kind of interesting, right? And helpful? Maybe?
One way to think about this is in absolute terms. Harvard’s endowment is roughly the size of the GDP of Afghanistan. And Harvard is to Afghanistan as Columbia is to Barbados.
But it’s more interesting to think in relative terms. If Harvard, the school with the largest endowment, were America, the country with the largest GDP, what countries would the other Ivy League schools be?
This is how it breaks down:
Harvard: United States
Yale: China and India
Princeton: France, Germany, Italy, and Portugal
Columbia: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand
Cornell: OPEC countries minus Iraq and Kuwait
UPenn: Germany (yes, UPenn is a subset of Princeton)
Dartmouth: Mexico and Guatemala
Brown: Australia and Singapore
The moral of the story? There’s a pretty big gap between Harvard and Brown, but we’re all still really rich. None of us is Djibouti.
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Oh, and my methodology? It’s hardly scientific, so please take advantage of the comments section to vent about its idiocy. But anyway, for transparency’s sake:
Here are the Ivy League endowment figures from 2009. We won’t use Harvard’s new figure for consistency’s sake.
Harvard: 26 billion
Yale: 22.6 bilion
Princeton: 12.6 billion
Columbia: 5.4 billion
Cornell: 5.39 billion
Penn: 5.2 billion
Dartmouth: 2.8 billion
Brown: 2 billion
Expressing each endowment figure as a percent of Harvard’s leaves us with the following numbers:
Harvard: 1
Yale: 0.8692
Princeton: 0.4846
Columbia: 0.2077
Cornell: 0.2073
Penn: 0.2000
Dartmouth: 0.1077
Brown: 0.0769
Now multiply each of those figures by 14,140,000,000,000 (the GDP of the U.S. in 2009 adjusted for purchasing power parity, according to the CIA World Factbook), and you get the relative “GDPs” of each university. Then, with some crude rounding and approximation, we match each university’s “GDP” with the GDPs of different countries, and we get our analogies. Figures are in brackets (without three sets of zeroes) for reference.
Harvard: United States
Yale ["GDP" relative to Harvard: 12290]: China and India [actual combined GDPs: 12318]
Princeton [6852]: France, Germany, Italy, and Portugal [6879]
Columbia [2937]: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand (combined) [2946]
Cornell [2931]: OPEC minus Iraq and Kuwait (in other words, Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela) [2936]
UPenn [2828]: Germany [2810]
Dartmouth [1523]: Mexico and Guatemala [1533]
Brown [1088]: Australia and Singapore [1094]
Yes, I have a lot of time on my hands.
for your next post, can you go into non-Ivies, so we do get down to djibouti?
Comparing endowments to GDP is silly. A batter (though still pretty useless) analogy would be to total assets.
Also, if Harvard’s endowment went from $26B last year to $27.4B this year, it only gained about 5.4%. An 11% gain would have increased it to about $28,9B I realize these figures came from an article in the Harvard Crimson and that the calculations aren’t Mr. Ghadimi’s, but they still don’t add up.
GDP measures goods produced in a year, not the total amount of assets a country has at a moment. Try comparing GDP to change in endowments in a year
Learn to be more accurate as a college student. Taiwan is a province of China, not a country. I guess you are not a history major!
This is fucking worthless.
Because the US’s GDP is so gigantic, all sense of scale is completely thrown about when you assign countries.
Also, who wants to read a post that creates a meaningless system, applies said system, and then doesn’t even yield a result that puts Columbia is an interesting or dominant place?