I've always been fascinated by college endowments. They play a large role in a university's financial health, dictating how much money it 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. This can be clearly seen with Harvard, which 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 collected data on the endowments of the "Ivy Plus" institutions across the past decade. The definition is put forward by the Ivy Plus Consortium, and 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, and so on) along with other extremely elite universities (MIT, UChicago, and others).

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