Endowment across the Jewish day school world sits in very few hands, while tuition assistance spreads far more evenly. The schools holding the least accumulated wealth tend to devote the largest share of revenue to helping families.
An original dataset assembled by hand from public IRS Form 990 filings, historical and archived filings, Internet Archive / Wayback captures, and school and public web sources, reconstructed across eight fiscal years. Every endowment figure comes from Schedule D and every aid figure from Schedule I, read filing by filing so that $942.4M in disclosed assistance and $484m of endowment across 90 schools line up school by school over time.
A peer set of comparable independent schools appears only as a secondary cross-reference where noted; the findings rest on the assembled 990 record above.
Concentration of wealth is stark: five schools hold nearly two-fifths of all reported endowment. The intuitive consequence is a two-tier sector, where well-endowed schools can afford generosity and others cannot. Tested against disclosed tuition assistance, that consequence does not appear.
Among the 107 schools disclosing tuition assistance, 43 report no endowment at all, and several of them still run aid programmes that rival well-endowed peers. Every dollar of that aid is raised in the same year it is spent, which leaves those programmes exposed to any shortfall in annual giving.
The distinction runs along how aid is paid for rather than how much is given. Some schools cover comparable assistance from endowment income, while others raise the same money every year from appeals. Two schools can look identical on generosity in a single year and face completely different odds of surviving a bad one.
A commitment funded from capital and a commitment funded from this year’s appeal look the same on paper, right up until fundraising falls short.Endowment & Aid · Season 1
They diverge the moment a fundraising target is missed. One draws on accumulated capital to hold steady; the other has to find the shortfall or cut the aid.
A blank endowment field on a filing cannot by itself distinguish a school with no endowment from one that simply left the line empty. If the second case were common, the fragility finding would be inflated. To test that, a secondary cross-reference against a peer set of comparable independent schools helps, because that record asks two separate questions: whether a school has an endowment, and what it is worth. Across 1,576 school-years answering yes, 96.8% also reported a value. A school that holds an endowment yet stays silent on the amount turns out to be rare where the two answers can be checked side by side, so a blank field in the 990 record mostly means genuinely none.
Tuition assistance in parseable form appears for 107 schools. The figures are a lower bound on actual sector aid.
The disclosure test compares rates across two different samples. It is not a school-by-school verification.
Schedule I detail exists only for schools filing the full Form 990, biasing toward larger institutions.
Classification comes from naming conventions and verification rather than self-report.
An original dataset assembled by hand from public IRS Form 990 filings, historical and archived filings, Internet Archive / Wayback captures, and school and public web sources, reconstructed across fiscal years 2017–2024. Endowment was read from Schedule D and tuition assistance from Schedule I, Part III, across 1,165 raw e-filings, with grant-type labels filtered to isolate family-facing aid and exclude staff remission.
Of 533 extracted aid records, 531 came from the structured Schedule I field, spanning 107 schools and $942.4 million in cumulative disclosed assistance. The disclosure test compares rates across two different samples rather than verifying schools one by one, and Schedule I detail exists only for schools filing the full Form 990, which biases toward larger institutions. To gauge whether a blank endowment field means genuinely none, the 990 record was cross-referenced against a peer set of comparable independent schools, used only as a secondary check.
From Endowment Concentration in American Jewish Day Schools, Gavriel Brown, PhD, research note, July 2026.
A data project on how Jewish life is paid for. The work comes in seasons. This page is part of Season 1 — Jewish Education. It states its own sources, sample sizes and limits.
Ahead: Season 2 — Household Affordability · Season 3 — Federation & Charitable Giving
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