Two students sitting in the same exam room, answering the same questions, paying the same tuition, and attending colleges with fifty-six different financial situations seem a little ridiculous. However, that is exactly the situation in the sixty-seven colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, where Clare Hall, which is only a short bike ride away, has about £43 million in net assets and Trinity College Cambridge has about £2.4 billion. Even though the disparity is not new, looking at the numbers still makes people take a second look.
Due to centuries of accumulated endowments, property portfolios, and investment returns, Oxbridge’s colleges have amassed a combined wealth of approximately £21 billion over the past ten years. For the 2024–2025 year, Oxford’s colleges alone reported endowments totaling £7.1 billion, with £448 million in net investment gains. These establishments are not in trouble. You can sense the weight of that money in the stonework, the well-kept lawns, and the leisurely silence that only profound financial security can purchase when you stroll through the courtyards of Magdalen or King’s.
The numbers at the top of the table are almost overwhelming. Trinity Cambridge has a significant lead, followed by Magdalen Oxford at almost £986 million and St John’s Cambridge at slightly over £1 billion. The Queen’s College, Christ Church, and All Souls complete a top tier that would make most small universities in the world jealous. These universities own farmland that stretches across the English countryside, historic buildings, and diverse investment portfolios that include holdings in everything from global stocks to commercial real estate. Trinity’s per-student wealth amounts to about £2.7 million, which is impressive even though it speaks more about the depth of the endowment than about what any one undergraduate actually receives.
The image changes significantly when you drop to the opposite end. The mature-student college at Oxford, Harris Manchester, has about £50 million. £60 million is managed by Linacre. The price of St Edmund’s Cambridge is approximately £49 million. The relative inequality within a single university system is difficult to overlook, but these are not impoverished locations—£50 million is still substantial by any standard. Fitzwilliam students have access to approximately £225,000 in net assets per capita, which is twelve times less than that of Trinity students. Both students study the same subjects, are taught by the same faculty, and are subject to the same regulations.
In actuality, none of this might be as important as the numbers indicate. Richer universities are able to provide larger bursaries, better-kept libraries, more opulent dining halls, and cozier housing. Poorer universities frequently make up for it with a sense of camaraderie and tenacity, but when the roof needs to be fixed, goodwill can only go so far. The structural disparity is still large and, if anything, seems to be growing as investment returns compound over time, despite Oxford and Cambridge’s combined resource-sharing agreements intended to lessen the disparities.
It seems that Oxbridge has always functioned as a conglomeration of fiefdoms disguised as a single organization, and the financial data makes this arrangement remarkably apparent. The question of whether the wealth concentrated in a small number of medieval foundations should be more aggressively distributed throughout the system is one that occasionally comes up and then quietly disappears. There isn’t much motivation for the colleges to promote it. The idea of transferring parts of Trinity’s endowment to less established, more recent universities is likely to encounter opposition because the endowment did not grow overnight. Nevertheless, the question of whether the system is merely unequal or something more akin to structurally unfair remains when two students at the same university live under a fifty-six-fold wealth gap
