Graduation Year
2025
Document Type
Campus Only Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Economics
Reader 1
Patrick Van Horn
Reader 2
Nicholas Kacher
Terms of Use & License Information
Abstract
Recent societal and economic trends affecting liberal arts colleges will lead to heightened competition amongst each other and against larger institutions. The upcoming challenges that they will face necessitate an understanding of what can help liberal arts colleges not only survive, but succeed. Two principal drivers of success are identified as endowment characteristics and ranking performance. A unique dataset is created to perform econometric analysis studying the effect of endowment management types (in-house, outsource, and committee-consultant) on annual endowment returns, as well as the effect of annual endowment return on performance in the next year’s USN&WR rankings. Outsourced management is found to generate statistically significantly higher returns than in-house management, and endowment return is found to have a significant positive relationship with next year’s ranking. These findings bring about important implications regarding institutional decision-making surrounding endowment management, and offer new insight into the risks & returns, and costs & benefits that institutions must balance when making these decisions.
Recommended Citation
Wilson, Sophia E., "The Survival of the Liberal Arts College: Connecting Endowment Management Type, Endowment Returns, and U.S. News and World Report Rankings" (2025). Scripps Senior Theses. 2563.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2563
This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.
