Saving, wealth, performance, and revenues in US colleges and universities

Data on institutional saving in US higher education have not been available until now, yet they are useful in several ways. They describe how various types of schools are doing financially, and whether their present behavior is sustainable. They complete the picture of sources and uses of revenue for institutions of higher learning, which allows us to pin down the degree to which the charitable mission of these schools is responsible for their income. They describe a limit to aggressive price reductions. And they allow for some projections of what the economic structure of higher education will look like in the future. Financial data for U.S. higher education institutions from the U.S. Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) are used to compute savings rates for 2109 institutions in 1995-6, and for 1581 institutions for a panel of the years 1986-7, 1990-1, and 1995-6. These data are available as Excel or Stata files.