They grew their endowments through an honest-to-goodness capital campaign. The current Tech administration does not believe in capital campaigns.
Georgia Tech, who is NOT Ivy League and is in fact a state school, has nearly $2 billion.
If ULL can get their endowment to ~$120 mil just by asking, I'm sure Tech could easily have matched that. And since funding per student is one of the criteria used by raters such as the US News Top 200 universities, I believe we would have made the jump to the next level in their rankings if we had even just twice our current endowments (which would still have us way behind other southern engineering schools). We are, last I looked, at the top of whatever US News grouping we are classified in.
I agree completely. I wish we would start a campaign to raise our endowments. I have been thinking about starting something to make this issue known to people. I am leaning towards a facebook group and email campaign but I don't know that much about starting a facebook group. I was thinking $10 for Tech would be the name and I would ask that everyone who is able to give $10 per month to Tech in some way (LTAC, annual fund, etc) and emphasize endowments. Giving money to endowments actually has a 3 fold effect on Tech's US News and World report rankings. Alumni giving is 5% of the ranking (based on the number of alumni who give back to the university). Any donation will affect that number directly. The other factors that it will have an influence on less directly are Faculty resources (20%) and Financial resources (10%)
The center for measuring university performance also looks at endowment and alumni giving (they rank according to the total amount of the donations versus the number of donors). The CfMUP are the ones who determine the Tier 1 research university and such. We don't have enough federal research to qualify for consideration but I'm just pointing out that many people look at alumni giving and endowments to rank universities.
Its the reason LSU and Tulane have both started (very succesful) campaigns to increase thier endowments.