Graph of Ivy Plus Endowments (2014 - 2024)

I've always been fascinated by college endowments. They play a large role in a University's financial health, as it dictates how much money they can allocate to financial aid, research and other programs. The current size of the endowment determines not only the current financial state of a University, but also the future state of the University. This can be clearly seen with Harvard, as it was able to start its endowment early (over 100 years before the founding of the United States) and has thus been able to invest and grow its endowment to over $50B today. It brings into question the role of endowments and the correct balance between investing in the future and contributing to the current prosperity of the University.

For accuracy, I manually the endowments over the past 10 years of the "Ivy Plus" institutions. This definition is put forward by the Ivy Plus Consortium, and the definition is maintained by each of its member institutions. This group generally consists of the most elite universities in the US, including the Ivy league (Princeton, Harvard, ...) as well as other extremely elite universities (MIT, UChicago, ...).

I've also created this data as a standalone dataset, which can be found here