Universities🎓
Which educational institution reigns supreme?
Happy Tuesday! We’d like to start today’s newsletter by welcoming Min Hui to the team. Min Hui graduated from Cambridge University in 2023 and has now joined Genuine Impact as an Analyst. Welcome Min Hui!
Speaking of Cambridge, today’s newsletter is all about universities. We’re shedding the light on the best and richest universities (which interestingly, do not go hand in hand) as well as the most popular university subjects.
Which Universities are the Richest?
University endowments are funds amassed through donations from individuals, alumni and corporations.
Public universities are funded by state allocations, tuition, grants, and donations. Meanwhile, private universities rely on tuition fees and donations to grow their endowments.
The largest endowment worldwide is for the University of Texas System, the public university system in Texas, which includes nine universities and five independent health institutions. Overall, the endowment is worth $69.2 billion.
The largest endowment fund for a single university is Stanford University, at $63 billion in value.
Which Universities are the Best?
If you’re considering which University to attend for your undergraduate degree (in which case, kudos to you for reading Genuine Impact at such a young age), then the QS World University Rankings are a good place to start.
And it turns out, more money ≠ better teaching. Just under a third of the richest universities from our chart feature in the top 20 universities worldwide.
This bar chart vividly encapsulates global academic achievements. With Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) securing the lead, the United States claims 10 spots among the top 20 universities. The chart echoes academic excellence spanning multiple nations, including the UK, Australia, Switzerland, Singapore and China.
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As you saw above, the United States and United Kingdom dominate the top 20 universities. But which countries have the most universities from the top 1000?
This bar chart provides insight into the distribution of top 1000 universities across different countries. Notably, the United States takes the lead with an impressive count of 154 universities, followed closely by the United Kingdom with 94. China's ascent, represented by 59 universities, highlights its growing significance on the global academic landscape.
Which University Subjects are most popular?
The Universities and Colleges Admission Services (UCAS) is the UK system for applying to University. Each year, they publish statistics on admissions for each course group.
Below we visualise the data. Interest in most subjects has increased over time, with the exception of ‘sciences combined with social sciences or arts’, which saw a decline since 2011. This may or may not be correlated with the increase of annual university fees from £3,350 to £9,000, which happened at the time.
See you tomorrow for charts on IPOs!
Created by Min Hui and Shivani
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The authors show that out of the Top 10 Universities globally, 4 are in the UK with paltry endowments in comparison to US cohort (Cambridge is £9bn, Oxford is £5bn, Imperial is £550m) ... Compared to Stanford at $63bn, Harvard at $53bn and MIT at $42bn! ....My son graduated this week from UCL (No. 9 globally) and i recently found out their endowment is less than £150m....perhaps money is less correlated than we think with great research, great teachers and the best education?
Our “common heritage”. Never forget that you belong to an economy that allows wealthy people, enjoying first class freedoms, to invest in companies that repeatedly misuse our science, our tax dollars, our highway and healthcare systems, even our sunlight, water, plants, and soils while exploiting our labor, too, all of this only to help sweeten, for instance, a highly addictive drug and package it the into a small, stylish container, then give it a cool name like “Tyson 2.0 Heavy Weight 7000 Puff disposable vape pod system from Mike Tyson” to better guarantee their tobacco industry a new generation of young people dependent on useless products, smoking nicotine every day for the rest of their shortened, lung-crusted lives.