The gap in Oxford college endowments per student – from £1.23m at Magdalen to just £2,400

All Souls College’s endowment works out at around £53.7m per current student, while Green Templeton College’s is just £2.4k, according to The Tab’s analysis of Oxford’s latest college accounts.

All Souls is an outlier — it has only ten fully enrolled students and no undergraduate members, making it incomparable to a typical college. The most striking comparable figure is Nuffield College, with £2.72m per student.

The figures show a massive financial gap between students at the same university, with some Oxford colleges sitting on hundreds of millions of pounds in endowment funds and others having only a tiny fraction of that wealth per student.

Oxford’s latest college accounts show total college endowments were valued at £7.1bn at the end of July 2025. But the money is very unevenly spread across the collegiate university.

Using each college’s 2024/25 endowment funds and Oxford’s latest student numbers, The Tab calculated how much each college’s endowment works out at per current student.

Two students can graduate with the same Oxford degree while belonging to colleges with radically different levels of accumulated wealth behind them.

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Nuffield College is another outlier, with an endowment of around £299.4m and just 110 students, giving it an endowment-per-student figure of roughly £2.72m. Christ Church, St John’s, Queen’s and Merton also sit near the top of the ranking. St John’s had endowment funds of £779.8m and 700 students, working out at around £1.11m per student. Queen’s had around £410m in endowment funds and 535 students, or roughly £766k per student.

At the other end of the ranking, Green Templeton had endowment funds of just £1.5m and 610 students, giving it an endowment per student of about £2.4k. St Hugh’s, Mansfield, Harris Manchester, St Anne’s and Linacre were also among the lowest-ranked colleges by endowment per student.

This does not mean that any individual student personally receives this money. College endowments are long-term funds, often made up of restricted donations, investments, land, property or funds designated for specific purposes. Many colleges use investment income, rather than the capital itself, to support teaching, buildings, bursaries, fellowships and other college costs.

Oxford says its colleges are independent, self-governing and financially autonomous. The university also says colleges provide accommodation for around three-quarters of Oxford’s full-time students and subsidise teaching, research and residential activity through donations, legacies and investment income.

Kellogg, Reuben and St Cross were not included as separate college entries in this ranking, because Oxford says they do not have Royal Charters and their financial results are consolidated into the university’s own financial statements.

The University of Oxford was contacted for comment. 

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