Most of the families cannot pay tuition. Most of the schools have few donors. Yet these fifteen ultra-Orthodox yeshivas in New York and New Jersey, hasidic and litvish institutions that grant a Bachelor of Talmudic Law, stay open year after year. We read their own financial reports to find out how. The short version: two government grants pay most of the bills. At Talmudical Seminary of Bobov, those two grants came to 94 percent of all the money the school took in, an estimate from the school's own report.
It costs a yeshiva between $7,092 and $13,889 to teach one student for a year. Those are estimates from each school's own spending. A poor student can bring the school a federal Pell Grant of up to $7,395. If the school year runs long enough, the same student can bring up to $11,092. In New York, the student can also bring a state grant called TAP. At most of these schools, nine out of ten students qualify. So the grants add up. At seven of the fifteen schools, the two grants were between 64 and 94 percent of all the money coming in. All of this is legal. One school does not fit the pattern. Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, the largest yeshiva in the country, lives mostly on donors.
What does it cost to run a yeshiva for a year?
Every college that takes federal aid must send a financial report to the Education Department each year. That is true even if the school files nothing with the IRS. The newest year we could read is the year ending June 2018. We took each school's total spending that year and divided it by the number of students. The result is a rough cost per student. In the chart, each bar is one school. A longer bar means more spent per student. The two red bars are Yeshiva University and Touro, degree-granting universities with a general curriculum, on the page for comparison.
Now compare those costs with the grants. In 2023-24 the poorest students could get $7,395 in Pell. In New York they could also get TAP. At Kiryas Joel, TAP came to $4,778 per student, an estimate. Put the two together and a student brings in roughly what the student costs. A school like that does not need much tuition from parents. It does not need many donors either. The rest of this page checks whether that is what the records show.
Can the families pay?
Pell is a federal grant for students from low-income families. It depends on family income and family size, so a family with a modest income and many children qualifies easily. That is why Pell reaches so deep into communities with large families. Each dot below is one school. The dot shows the share of its undergraduates who got Pell in 2021-22, the newest year we could read.
At six of the schools, between 86 and 96 percent of students get Pell. That means the federal formula has looked at nearly every family and found that it cannot pay much. So tuition from parents cannot be what keeps these schools open. Something else does.
If the families cannot pay, who does?
The same yearly report lists where each school's money came from. It also says how much of the tuition arrived as Pell and as state grants. Each bar below is one school's total income for the year ending June 2018. Every bar is stretched to the same width so the pieces can be compared. Blue is Pell. Gold is state grants. Green is the rest of tuition, the part paid by families or anyone else. Orange is private gifts. Gray is everything else, such as dormitories and meals. Look at how much blue and gold there is in the top bars. Then look at how little orange.
At seven schools, the two grants were between 64% and 94% of all income. Those seven are Bobov, Be'er Yaakov, Kiryas Joel, United Talmudical Seminary, Viznitz, Machzikai Hadas and Bobover Bnei Zion. All of these shares are estimates from the schools' own figures. Their gifts were small. Viznitz reported no gifts at all, and United Talmudical Seminary reported the most, $2,561,205. Take the grants away and these schools would have to replace two-thirds to nine-tenths of their budgets.
Can these numbers be checked against a tax return? Usually not. Most nonprofits file a Form 990 with the IRS every year. Religious bodies are allowed to skip it. Ten of the fourteen schools here with federal records have no 990 on file. Two yeshivas do file one. Their 990s for 2018 report income of $4,213,362 and $4,594,916. Their reports to the Education Department say the same, to the dollar. That is a good sign that the other schools' reports can be trusted too.
How can the average grant be larger than the maximum grant?
In 2023-24 the fifteen schools received $105,544,206 in Pell for 13,498 students, a sum and so an estimate. Almost none of it came with loans. Thirteen of the fifteen schools do not appear in the federal loan file at all. Now the puzzle. Divide each school's Pell dollars by its number of Pell students. That gives the average grant per student. In the chart, the solid line at $7,395 is one full grant. The line at $11,092 is one and a half grants. A student can only reach the band between them by finishing more than one academic year of work in twelve months.
Bobov's average of $10,832 is close to the ceiling of $11,092. Nearly every student there received a second grant inside the year.
An average above $7,395 is only possible if most students got more than one full grant in the year. Federal rules allow this. They were written for students who keep studying through the summer. A program that runs ten months a year produces that kind of student on purpose. The accreditor of these yeshivas requires a ten-month year. The calendar below shows how it works. The top row is an ordinary college: two semesters, one academic year, one grant. The bottom row is a ten-month program. Its first academic year ends around week thirty. Everything after that counts toward a second academic year, and earns a second, partial grant. The two grants together may not pass $11,092.
None of this is a loophole. Congress wrote the second grant into the law, at 20 U.S.C. 1070a. Now look back at the budgets in section 03. The seven schools where the grants were two-thirds or more of income are all orange dots here. The second grant is what makes their budgets balance.
What does New York State add, and to whom?
The gold pieces in section 03 are New York's TAP grant. The state lets these schools into TAP under a special rule called Chapter XXII. The rule accepts the same accreditation that opens the federal door. Each row below is one New York school. The blue dot is its number of Pell students. The gold dot is its number of TAP students. When the two dots sit close together, the two programs are paying for the same people.
Across all Chapter XXII schools, TAP came to $46,029,655 for 9,654 students in the state year labeled 2024. In 2011 it was $8,382,421 for 3,719 students. The program has grown more than five times over in dollars.
This is the largest school on both charts. In 2023-24 it received $21,460,143 in Pell for 2,380 students. That is $9,017 per student, an estimate, or 121.9 percent of one full grant. New York paid it $11,456,996 in TAP for 2,398 students. Together, its students brought in $32,917,139 in grants in one year, an estimate. None of it was a loan.
| Pell disbursed, 2023-24 | $21,460,143 |
| Pell recipients | 2,380 |
| Average Pell per recipient estimate | $9,017 |
| NY TAP dollars, HESC year 2024 | $11,456,996 |
| NY TAP recipients | 2,398 |
| Direct Loan dollars, 2023-24 | $0 |
| Pell plus TAP estimate | $32,917,139 |
These schools teach no biology, accounting, literature or math. How are they colleges in the eyes of the law?
Some readers of this page study or teach at these schools. The question here is about the law, not about them. The federal rule for who can receive student aid has five parts. A school must admit high school graduates. It must have a state license. It must grant a degree. It must be nonprofit. And it must be accredited by an agency the Education Department recognizes. None of the five parts mentions subjects. A music school qualifies without a chemistry lab. A yeshiva that grants a Bachelor of Talmudic Law qualifies the same way. Twelve of the fifteen schools are accredited by AARTS, an agency for rabbinical schools. Its handbook says a credit means seven hours a day of shiur (lecture) and beth medrash (study hall), five days a week, ten months a year. That ten-month year is what produces the second grant. The picture below walks through the six steps, with the court cases on the right.
The courts have moved further in the schools' favor since then. In Carson v. Makin in 2022, the Supreme Court held that a state which pays for private schooling cannot leave out schools because they are religious. So the grants are settled law. Who checks that the grants are earned is a harder question. Washington's tests for colleges whose degrees do not pay off work by cutting off federal loans. That includes the earnings test that takes effect in July 2026. A school with no loans has nothing to lose from those tests. What remains is the Education Department's own review office and the accreditor. Neither one publishes what it finds.
Is Beth Medrash Govoha the pattern or the exception?
Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, New Jersey, is the biggest yeshiva in the country. In 2023-24 it received $15,834,879 in Pell for 2,708 students. That is $5,847 per student, an estimate, or 79.1 percent of one full grant. Its students took no loans. Its money works differently from the other schools, and its newest report is a misleading place to start. The chart below shows its income for three years in a row, in dollars. The year's spending is printed under each bar. Watch the orange piece.
In that normal year, the school charged $65,217,864 in tuition. It then gave out $67,370,888 in its own scholarships, more than it charged. It actually collected $19,402,772. Of that, $9,819,918 was Pell and $6,109,610 was New Jersey's grant. So the two grants were 31% of income, an estimate. That is well under half the share at Kiryas Joel. Donors covered $21,219,154 of a $50,514,636 budget.
New Jersey publishes its Tuition Aid Grant by type of school, never by school. So there is no recent public figure for Lakewood's state grant. Two questions remain. Where do the gifts come from? And what was the 2018 spike?
If families do not pay and the school files no tax return, who pays for Lakewood?
Beth Medrash Govoha has filed no Form 990 since 2007. So its donors have to be found in other people's paperwork. Three related organizations do file. One of them explains the 2018 spike. It is called the Educational Endowment Fund. Its stated purpose is to support the yeshiva. Over thirteen years of returns it held between $17.3 million and $23.4 million in assets. In 2017 it reported $42,850,113 in spending on only $1,796,561 of income. Its own filing says why. On September 30, 2017, it gave the yeshiva 88 percent of Cedarbridge LLC, a Lakewood real estate company it owned through a subsidiary. The stake was appraised at $38,612,464. It added $2,018,400 in cash. The whole transfer came to $40,630,864. That is the orange spike in section 07. In other words, the yeshiva's largest donor that year was its own endowment.
The rest of the donors can only be seen through their own filings. We searched the full text of electronic IRS returns for the yeshiva's name. The search found 958 filings since 2010. We could read 550 of them before the website cut us off. In those, 184 different organizations named the yeshiva. Most were small private foundations. The gifts we could see ranged from a few thousand dollars to a few hundred thousand. So the $17,475,376 to $21,219,154 in gifts in a normal year comes from many hands. Most of those hands file nothing that names who they gave to.
The government side is easier to read, because every federal award is public. The chart below shows Lakewood's Pell Grant for nineteen years, one column per year. Hover a column to see the number of students where the source gives it. Watch the last two columns.
Pell is the federal money that comes every year. The one-time federal money was even larger. Between 2020 and 2022, the Education Department gave the yeshiva $32,817,844 in pandemic relief, known as HEERF. That is a sum of three awards. In 2023 the Department of Housing and Urban Development gave it $3,000,000 in funding directed by Congress. Three of the yeshiva's organizations also took Paycheck Protection Program loans. Their face values add up to $3,726,227.
So the answer for Lakewood has three parts. In a normal year, government grants cover about a third of its income and donors cover about two fifths. Most of those donors cannot be seen. In one unusual year, the biggest gift on record came from the yeshiva's own endowment, in the form of a stake in a real estate company. And since 2024, its federal grant has grown faster than its student body. The largest yeshiva in the country now looks a little more like the small ones.
So: how can these ultra-Orthodox yeshivas exist?
Because the government pays each school about what a student costs. At seven of the fifteen schools, Pell and New York TAP were between 64 and 94 percent of income in the year ending June 2018. Those shares are estimates from the schools' own reports. Nine in ten of their students qualify for Pell. And the federal grant runs above its normal maximum, because a ten-month school year earns a second grant. Lakewood was the exception. It lived on gifts, including a large one from its own endowment. Since 2024 its federal grant has also passed one full grant per student. What follows is what the data does not show.
It does not show any school's finances after June 2018, or its enrollment after 2021-22. So the cost per student and the Pell dollars come from different years. It does not show what the degrees lead to. Graduation data is not available for any of the fifteen. It does not show who Lakewood's individual donors are. The yeshiva files no return, and donor lists are redacted in any case. And it does not show New Jersey's state grant to Lakewood in any recent year.
Each school's grant share is its Pell and state grants divided by its total income. Cost per student is total spending divided by the number of students. Each average grant is Pell dollars divided by Pell students. Lakewood's income mix uses the year ending 2017, because its 2018 gift was a transfer from its own endowment. The HEERF, PPP and loan totals are sums of separate awards. The data table gives the method for every estimate.
A newer financial report. The Department holds reports for the years ending 2022 and 2023. If those show the top schools in section 03 now raising most of their money from gifts or from families, the answer has changed since 2018. A second test: if the Department's own Pell tables show that students at Bobov, Kasho and Viznitz mostly got exactly one full grant, then the explanation in section 04 is wrong.
The full data table of 1,369 labeled rows, the source log including the documents that came up empty, and the method behind every estimate.
Federal Student Aid Data Center, Title IV Program Volume Reports, Grant Volume by School, the award year summary sheet of the file for 2023-24 (grants-ay23-24-q4.xls), describing award year 2023-24, data as of 1 April 2026. Retrieved 6 September 2026. All Pell recipient and dollar figures.
Federal Student Aid Data Center, Direct Loan Volume by School, award year summary for 2023-24 (dl-dashboard-ay2023-2024-q4.xls), data as of 1 April 2026. Retrieved 6 September 2026. All Direct Loan figures and the absence of thirteen institutions.
US Department of Education, Dear Colleague Letter GEN-23-02, 2023-2024 Federal Pell Grant Payment and Disbursement Schedules, 26 January 2023. Retrieved 6 September 2026. The $7,395 maximum and the 150 percent provision.
34 CFR 690.64, current text on eCFR. Retrieved 6 September 2026. The rule that an institution may not pay more than one and one-half of a scheduled award in an award year.
New York State Higher Education Services Corporation, TAP Recipients and Dollars by College, Sector Group, and Level of Study, Beginning 2000, Open Data NY dataset ich7-7ewa, describing HESC years 2011 through 2024. Retrieved 6 September 2026. All TAP figures.
New York State HESC, Tuition Assistance Program Manual for Chapter XXII Schools, version 4, August 2015. Retrieved 6 September 2026. The conditions for Chapter XXII eligibility.
Association of Advanced Rabbinical and Talmudic Schools, List of AARTS Institutions, June 2026, and Handbook of the Accreditation Commission, 2 June 2026. Retrieved 6 September 2026. Accreditation dates and standards 3.3.1 and 5.7.12.2.
Beth Medrash Govoha, Financial Aid Handbook 2024-2025 and Financial Aid Procedures 2025-26. Retrieved 6 September 2026. Academic year definition, aid programs, the TAG maximum and the printed school code.
IPEDS Institutional Directory 2022, Finance component for the fiscal years ending 2016, 2017 and 2018, and the Student Financial Aid and 12-month Enrollment components for 2017-18 and 2021-22, read through the Urban Institute's Education Data Portal, a mirror of the NCES files. Retrieved 6 and 9 September 2026. Identifiers, revenue by source, Pell and state-grant pass-through, institutional aid, total expenses, headcount, and the share of undergraduates on Pell.
ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, organization records by EIN for all fourteen institutions with IPEDS records. Retrieved 9 September 2026. Which institutions file a Form 990, and the figures for those that do.
20 U.S.C. 1001(a), the definition of an institution of higher education, and 20 U.S.C. 1070a(b)(9) and (d)(5), the one-and-one-half award rule and the twelve-semester lifetime limit; 34 CFR 600.2 and 34 CFR 668.3. Current text, Cornell Legal Information Institute. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
Witters v. Washington Department of Services for the Blind, 474 U.S. 481 (1986); Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002); Carson v. Makin, 142 S. Ct. 1940 (2022). Opinions via Justia. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
ACLU of New Jersey v. Hendricks, New Jersey Supreme Court, A-22-16, decided 2 May 2018, opinion via Justia, with the New Jersey Constitution's Religious Aid Clause as quoted there; chronology after remand from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a party to the case. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
The 2025 budget reconciliation act signed 4 July 2025, as summarized by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and by Duane Morris LLP: the earnings test, its loan-only penalty, and its 1 July 2026 effective date. Secondary summaries; the enacted text should be cited before publication. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
Federal Student Aid Data Center, Grant Volume by School, award year summary sheets for 2021-22 (grants-ay21-22-q4.xls, data as of 1 April 2024), 2022-23 (data as of 1 July 2025), 2024-25 and 2025-26 (grants-ay24-25-q4.xls and grants-ay25-26-q4.xls, data as of 1 July 2026). Retrieved 24 September 2026. Pell dollars and recipients for the roster in those years.
USAspending.gov, award search by recipient name Beth Medrash Govoha, all award types, fiscal years 2008 to 2026, through the public API. Retrieved 24 September 2026. Pell obligations by award year from 2007-08, HEERF, HUD, Department of Labor, campus-based aid, Direct Loan base records and Paycheck Protection Program loans.
ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer: organization records and Form 990 data for Educational Endowment Fund Inc (EIN 02-0677193), Beth Medrash Govoha of Lakewood Inc (22-3839462) and Beth Medrash Govoha of New York (22-3487209); the full e-filed 2017 return of the Educational Endowment Fund, including Schedules I, O and R; and the Filing Text search for the phrase Beth Medrash Govoha. Retrieved 24 September 2026.
Every figure on this page traces to a row in the companion data table labeled Verified or Estimated. Hover any mark for its exact value; open "Show the numbers" under any chart for the rows it draws.
Ḥeshbon
A data project on how Jewish life is paid for, published in full. Every figure comes from the underlying research, and where a chart simplifies a published result the piece says so.
Each piece here is published, with its own sources, sample sizes and limits stated in place. Percentages describe the samples observed, and several rest on small denominators, noted where they appear. Nothing here audits an individual institution. Aliyah figures are current as of August 2026, at roughly three shekels to the dollar, and Israeli tax and benefit rules move faster than that.