http://finance.yahoo.com/news/much-money-country-richest-college-110037601.html
Yale continues relative out performance… although relative heavy weighting toward Private equity means these numbers could be massaged vs other asset classes ie stocks, commodities.
U of Penn had a very good year.
You can’t really tell much about investment performance from that chart, since what it shows is changes in endowments from all sources, including income, but also including donations, costs, and distributions. We can probably infer that Penn did pretty well – but it’s also towards the end of a huge capital campaign, too.
Also, it makes sense to remember that these are based on June 30 numbers. It’s been a pretty good year for equity investors since then. I bet some endowments are waaaaay up
True. If you spent a ton on a new library or science center last year, your total endowment will drop even if it was invested extremely well.
On the other hand, if your dorms haven’t been renovated since 1942 and you just discovered asbestos in the foundation of every building , you might be piling up the cash this year, but have a lot of deferred costs coming up that can’t be avoided forever.
Very misleading article.
U of Penn’s big capital campaign ended in 2013
https://news.upenn.edu/news/penn-campaign-raises-43-billion-transforming-university
so their relatively out-sized returns do not reflect this capital campaign if this is the one you’re referring to.
That’s not completely true. Unless the new library or science center is endowed via a special donation or restriction (in which case there would be little true net change in the endowment), most new building projects are financed through debt and then paid off slowly by endowment or other funds (general, auxiliary, etc.).
Sure - it was a simplification. Nevertheless, when you are talking about whether an endowment goes up or down by less than 2% in a year, there are outside factors that weigh in that make the statistic almost meaningless. A five year trend - now that will show you something .
I’d guess most if not maybe all medium to large endowments missed their benchmarks in 2016. As @ThankYouforHelp points out, one year doesn’t necessarily tell you much. That said, there has been a decent amount of CIO turnover in the last 6-12 months which likely means some colleges haven’t been happy with overall performance.
Yale’s endowment declined by 6%.
Yale’s endowment declined by 0.6%, which if “endowment decline” were a meaningful concept would be “outperformance” relative to Harvard, which had a percentage decline more than 8x Yale’s, and relative to the unweighted mean (-1.03%) and median (-1.35%) for the ten largest endowments.
yes relative out performance… in a year which many endowments declined Yale’s was flat. Yale has consistently been the top performer over the past decade
Yale is the benchmark endowment by which many are now emulating… In fact many of Yale’s disciples have now found work heading endowments at peer institutions… often not a good sign for this style of investing (once a style becomes popular results often decline) which involves a heavier weighting to private equity.
My bad. My glasses need changing.
These numbers have little to do with actual investment performance. Which is a shame.