The academic world has a legal tender of its own in the form of the number of Nobel Prize winners it has amassed, as alumni or faculty; the number of MBA students that have founded successful startups, the number of professors that have been tapped for top level government service, and so on. But in the crash of 2008, which wiped out roughly 50 trillion of global wealth, colleges and universities started to look to the more traditional purse strings because even the most prestigious and wealthy schools took an endowment bath.

This infographic illustrates the endowments and  just how hard even the loftiest schools were hit.  No matter how diversified the portfolio, how astute the investment managers, or how innovative the campus economics experts might have been, those schools with the best and the brightest – on staff and on campus – lost billions. Moreover universities both public and private have seen alumni contributions flagging because the most successful graduates also had a lot to lose, and did.  It’s all a matter of percentages, certainly, but these figures certainly cast some timeless institutions in a mortal light.