Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

There are currently more than eight hundred public and private universities in the United States that manage their own endowments. These endowments range from some tens of millions of dollars (for example, North Iowa Community College, ranked 785th in 2012 with an endowment of $11.5 million) to tens of billions. The top-ranked universities are invariably Harvard (with an endowment of some $30 billion in the early 2010s), Yale ($20 billion), and Princeton and Stanford (more than $15 billion). Then come MIT and Columbia, with a little less than $10 billion, then Chicago and Pennsylvania, at around $7 billion, and so on. All told, these eight hundred US universities owned nearly $400 billion worth of assets in 2010 (or a little under $500 million per university on average, with a median slightly less than $100 million).