As noted below, the church's contribution per year to school operations is over $800 million. If the school were trying to create an endowment that would no longer necessitate a church contribution each year, that would require a very large endowment. If BYU wanted to follow the 4% rule to cover that, it would require an endowment of at least $20 billion. That would put BYU in the same range as MIT ($23 billion) and U Penn ($20 billion), which have the fifth and sixth largest endowments in the nation.