Harvard's Sick of Losing to Yale and Has a Plan to Fix Endowment
- New endowment chief Stephen Blyth tries to revive sagging fund
- `Yale Sucks,' reads a framed t-shirt in his Boston office
Battle of the Ivy League Funds: Harvard to Fix Endowment
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In October, dozens of Wall Street financiers including activist shareholder Bill Ackman were invited to a lecture hall at Harvard to scrutinize the university’s lackluster endowment returns -- and a plan to revive them.
For more than an hour the Harvard Business School alumni debated whether the $37.6 billion fund could generate at least 5 percent a year as markets falter and whether it made sense to try to beat peers such as Yale University and Princeton University. At stake was Harvard’s status as the world’s richest university, with Yale, Stanford University and other schools making up ground through savvier investing and aggressive fundraising.