UF, UM top $1B in endowments

Numbers on all Florida universities and colleges

How much money a university receives from donors can play a big role in how well it serves its students — making the size of a school’s endowment an important factor.

Schools use endowments for a wide range of things, from financing extra professorships and doling out scholarships to constructing new buildings or entire degree programs.

Endowments are financed by donations from many sources, but the most prominent are donations from former students looking to give back to the institutions that helped to form them.

Such donations typically include “stipulations from the donor on how the institution can access its resources,” according to BestColleges, an online college-admissions publication. “These guidelines usually restrict use to certain schools or colleges within the university, or even to specific academic departments and programs.”

The university with the largest endowment in the United States is Harvard University, which as of last summer was a reported $50.7 billion.

No school in Florida has an endowment anywhere close to that. But two campuses in the Sunshine State can boast endowments worth more than $1 billion each.

The distinction of the largest endowment falls to the University of Florida, which was $2.4 billion in 2021. That’s nearly double the amount of the state’s second largest – the University of Miami, with $1.4 billion.

Florida schools ranked by endowment size

Here’s a list of every Florida college or university ranked by the size of their endowment. The figures are based on federal education statistics from 2021, the most recent year available.

University of Florida $2,375,793,000

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