And because of that endowment, almost no Duke students actually pay the rack-rate of $60K per year.
Private universities and colleges with fat endowments only charge rack-rate tuition to folks from well-heeled families who barely made the admissions cut. Everyone else gets scholarships in amounts based on how much the university wants the person to come. We paid the equivalent of in-state tuition at a state school to send our daughter to a private liberal arts college on the East Coast with a rack-rate tuition of $45K/year: she was from Kansas (geographic diversity!) and entered with enough college credits that she’d have walked in the door of a state university as a second-semester sophomore (with calc, freshman comp, and her whole language requirement for a B.A. out of the way) — they jolly well wanted her to come, and gave her big scholarships plus work-study jobs.
https://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=1026
For the 2012-2013 school year, about 800 freshmen (about 50% of the class) received an average of $42K in aid. That’s about $33 million, which represents about 0.6% of the endowment.
About 3.5% not needing financial aid receive “merit aid” (scholarships) averaging about $55K.
The numbers for the entire student body are similar.
So, do “almost no Duke students actually pay the rack-rate of $60K per year” as you say?
No, not true, a large percentage do.
The annual tax-advantaged returns on $6 billion in investments more than covers what they hand out to students.
In 2009-2010, donations to Duke amounted to $345 million.
A significant portion of that amount came right out of the taxpayers’ pockets in the form of tax deductions.
The notion that a university is a “non-profit” entity is bunk.