What do students at Georgetown and students at George Washington have in common? They both got into George Washington. That’s the joke, anyway, but in many ways it’s becoming a relic of a bygone era. Georgetown isn’t on the decline, but it suddenly leapt into the upper echelon of respected global universities under the guidance of President Timothy S. Healy, S.J. in the ‘80s and has basically stood still since. George Washington has risen from a second-tier university to an internationally recognized institution since the early ‘90s and remains on the move. And while Georgetown remains the reach school and George Washington the target for many high school seniors, more have begun to choose George Washington for its own sake.
“You can hear the kids talking more about George Washington,” Marilyn McMahon, mother of a freshman touring GW last weekend, said.
If you look at the most recent U.S. News and World Report “Best Colleges” list you’ll find Georgetown at 23 and George Washington tied with Syracuse for 52nd. You’ll also learn that GU’s acceptance rate is 22 percent compared to GW’s 37 percent. But these statistics are just the beginning of the story.
The picture changes if you compare figures over the last 20 years. In 1987, Georgetown accepted 21 percent of applications received, while GW’s rate was 76 percent in 1988. Notice that Georgetown actually became slightly less selective, while GW’s acceptance rate decreased by 39 percent. Their endowment is over $1 billion dollars, compared to our $885 million. Since 2000 they’ve built three new major academic buildings, a major athletic facility, added five new dormitories and opened a second campus. Georgetown built the Southwest Quad and the Performing Arts Center, and re-surfaced Harbin field. They built a hospital , while Georgetown sold a hospital. This past year GW ranked 21st nationally in Fulbright awards, while Georgetown came in 67th. How did this happen?
The simplest answer is President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, a lawyer who took the reins of a relatively uncompetitive college back in 1988.
“We had few resources, and people felt we were a cut below Georgetown University,” he said in an interview with The American Executive Spotlight a few years ago.
“We were a place where people went when they didn’t get into their first-choice college or university.”
His solution to this dilemma was simple: the University needed better students and more money to improve itself. So in his first two years, he raised tuition by 20 percent each year and used that money to offer more financial aid to high-performing students. He sought to create a core group of exceptional students around which the school could grow. This is better known as the 21st Century Scholars Program.
The clear success of this reverse-Robin Hood approach, taking more from the many and giving to the few, is not just reflected in the reduced acceptance rate and the 200-point jump in average SAT scores. Professors claim that they can see the evidence on campus.
“The student body is better,” Robert Dunn, a GW economics professor who follows the school’s finances closely, said. He agreed that merit-based financial incentives were instrumental in attracting better students and raising the intellectual bar at the school.
“They’ve become higher and higher quality,” Marilyn Liebrienz-Himes, a marketing professor in the School of Business agreed. “It’s very evident in the last 10 years.”
Aside from charging students more, having more students means more tuition, an advantage which is not lost on GW. The incoming undergraduate class size has more than doubled in the last 10 years, which not only raises their profile, but also provides more cash, both in the form of tuition in the short-term and in quickly increasing the pool of potentially generous alumni.
Faculty are also important, and Trachtenberg has invested in that too. Back in 1988 there were only 30 endowed chairs. Now there are 70, and the total full-time faculty is 15,000 strong.
Aside from the students and professors, another reason why GW looks impressive these days is just that: looks. For one thing, imposing federal buildings like the State Department are across the street, and the International Monetary Fund is actually built on the campus property.
“You’re next to the World Bank,” Elisa Wu, a sophomore at GW, said. “There’s nothing cooler than that.”
And for a campus smack in the middle of the city, a number of small touches like green spaces, decorative gates along common entrances to campus and an obnoxious bronze hippopotamus, which Trachtenberg donated when his wife refused to have it in their home, give the 30 square block campus a sense of unity.
“It has really created a sense of campus,” Liebrienz-Himes said.
There are also big touches, in the form of expensive new buildings: lots of them. Both the Elliott School of International Affairs and the School of Business are housed in buildings that still smell new. Instead of wandering through the monotonous halls of the ICC with a compass in hand, visitors at the business school’s Duqués Hall sit on comfortable, modern benches arranged around a mosaic of the world inlaid in the marble lobby while students in business attire hurry by on their way to an impressive mock stock-exchange floor.
The Elliot School is an impressive office tower that sits across from federal administrative buildings and has six elevators to speed students from the wood-paneled lobby to their classes, instead of leaving them wondering what crazy decorator in the ‘60s decided that the ceiling in the Walsh lobby should look like the locker room at a public pool. And while students interested in broadcast media at Georgetown turn to the warm embrace of GU Television, students at GW have the new Media and Public Affairs building. Crossfire on CNN was broadcast from the auditorium there until the program Reliable Sources replaced it last year. The tag line “Broadcast live from George Washington University” after every episode has greatly increased the University’s exposure to a national audience.
The biggest complaint about Trachtenberg is that all of this money is coming from the wrong places: that students are carrying more than their fair share of the burden are being supplemented by irresponsible investments.
“To some degree they’re squeezing it out of the students,” Dunn said. He estimated that 15 cents of each tuition dollar are being spent to mitigate the huge debt that the University has incurred for all of the construction, estimated at $796 million in 2005 a faculty committee.
A debt of $796 million is a lot, just $204 million shy of the total value of the endowment in fact, but it is not off the charts either: Georgetown’s total debt on the 2005 financial statements is $705.7 million ($180 million less than the endowment). However, the issue is stability. While an endowment looks like money in the bank on an admissions flier, the endowment at GW consists largely of the speculated value of the physical campus itself: the value of the land and the buildings.
“Most of our endowment is commercial real estate,” Dunn said. “They just look at the property assessment and mark up the endowment.”
About 85 percent of Georgetown’s endowment is liquid, made up of various interest-generating equities and cash. Our treasury bills can easily be bought and sold to maximize interest, but much of GW’s endowment can only actually generate income by selling or leasing the land. One of the school’s major initiatives is getting the land where the old hospital sat re-zoned from academic use to commercial use. Dunn estimated that, if re-zoning were approved, the property value would increase to about $200 million dollars. That means that when the city council takes a vote, the endowment figure should immediately shoot up by $100 million or so.
The returns are high, but a land-heavy endowment is somewhat risky, especially given recent speculation that the skyrocketing real-estate prices in D.C. might be only a bubble.
Another issue with the endowment is that GW has 23,000 total students, while Georgetown only has 13,346. That means that their endowment per student is only $43,378, compared to our $66,312. Their assets are spread much more thinly than ours, so they have to be selective about where they spend it.
They’re definitely not spending it on junior faculty, who have been attempting to unionize for years. Earl Skelton, a physics professor at Georgetown who worked at GW until last year, said that part-time and adjunct faculty at GW “are grossly underpaid.” He cited a report that said the salaries of senior administrators rose 35 percent between 1999 and 2005, while those of tenured faculty rose 20 to 25 percent and adjunct faculty did not receive any increases in pay. Several reports from the Faculty Senate also mentioned the issue.
Boiled down, Trachtenberg’s strategy has been to establish a high-quality school and hope for the emergence of a virtuous cycle that can pay for it.
“Success breeds success,” Liebrienz-Himes said of the philosophy.
Trachtenberg is scheduled to step down from the presidency next year, which will certainly be a major change at GW. The school is overheated from so much expansion, both in facilities and in students, and it is likely that the next few years will be a time of consolidation and paying down the debt that Trachtenberg accrued during his tenure.
Meanwhile, construction on the new business school building has already begun at Georgetown, and the new science building should begin going up around 2008. Back in 2000, DeGioia cut loose the hospital, which was a huge drain on University finances, and losses at the Medical Center, which Georgetown still owns, have gotten smaller. Georgetown is holding its own in faculty. The student-faculty ratio at Georgetown is about seven to one, while at GW there are 14 professors per student. Georgetown also has a strong lead in endowed chairs with 160 tenured professors to their 70 and pays more, which helps retain quality faculty members.
At the higher levels, rankings are also less meaningful. Georgetown has not once in the last 16 years fallen off of the top 25 in the U.S. News rankings, but has never gotten above 17th either. It’s a lot easier to raise a low score than a high one because the competition gets fiercer and there are fewer drastic improvements that can be made. In areas where there have been opportunities to grow Georgetown has shot up in the rankings. The relatively young McDonough School of Business MBA program, for example, ranked 19th in a Wall Street Journal poll this year, up from 38th last year.
John Brough, a tenured professor in the philosophy department, thinks that Georgetown has been capitalizing on its unique roots as a Jesuit and international institution, rather than simply running in place or, like GW, trying to cover every possible discipline.
“That’s just never been our model,” he explained. He believes that Georgetown has “developed further the strengths we already had.”
Brough said that Georgetown’s profile in his field has risen, and, though he would prefer to see more funding for the established departments, Georgetown has also established several new, high profile programs. The Center for Muslim-Christian, the Program for Jewish Civilization and the BMW Center for German and European Studies are just some of countless specialized programs on campus, and Georgetown opened a program in Education City in Qatar last fall. All of these increase Georgetown’s reputation for international and cultural studies.
Georgetown’s greatest weakness is its low endowment, but the financial outlook at Georgetown is improving, and it is certainly less problematic than at GW. Aside from cost-saving measures like losing the hospital, President DeGioia has been fairly successful at raising money, which faculty members agreed was the most important thing for a university president. And with a Thompson behind the wheel of the basketball team again, Georgetown is already making a bigger blip on the national radar.
Brough thinks that the universities are both different, and that D.C. is big enough for each to flourish in their own niche.
“I don’t think they’ve done better at our expense,” he said of GW.
On the other hand, high-tier universities tend to be very competitive. Why else would GW students and faculty alike be so eager to face the Hoyas on the basketball court.
