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What’s $400 million in the grand scheme of things anyway? A gift of $400 million might seem like a lot–especially to public colleges and universities–but to Harvard it’s only a drop in their $36 billion endowment bucket.

Having graduated from a regional public university (Missouri Southern State University), news of this gift to an already well-funded institution made me wonder: What could $400 million do at my alma mater and institutions like it? How far could a community college system stretch that money? How shocked will I be if I compare institutional endowments? Here are a few alternative ways to envision the impact of a $400 million gift:

• It would multiply Missouri Southern’s more than 12 times over. In per-student terms, adding $400 million to the pot would raise endowment from about $5,700 per student to just under $77,000 per student. Not bad for one gift from an alumnus.

• It would eliminate the average of in-state tuition and fees for four full years for just over 33,000 students at a four-year public institution. For scale, if we imagine that the entire undergraduate student body at the University of Missouri-Columbia paid US average in-state tuition, footing the bill for the outstanding tuition and fees after financial aid for each student for four years would still leave us with over $73 million burning a hole in our pocket.

• Alternatively, if we look at the national average  of tuition, fees, room and board at public 2-year institutions, a $400 million gift could fund two years of study for 33,557 students. In more practical terms, $400 million would cover the entire (tuition, fees, books, supplies, weighted room and board) for all 24,000 students in the St. Louis Community College system for two years with a little shy of $40 million left to pass along to the St. Louis Community College Foundation.

A dollar (or 400 million of them) can mean very different things in different contexts. For elite institutions with many wealthy students and enormous endowments, receiving a monetary gift may be cause for celebration. For public institutions–especially community colleges and regional universities–it could mean the difference between students striving toward and actually achieving their educational goals.”