Deals
A Rough Midterm for College Funds
Volatility across global markets has hurt short-term returns.
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The managers of U.S. college endowments try hard to earn more for their schools than a plain-vanilla portfolio of stocks would. That’s never easy, and lately it’s been especially tough.
Fifteen endowments that provided Bloomberg with total returns for the second half of 2015 lost 3.6 percent on average. In the same period, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index earned a slight gain with dividends. While global markets have revived recently, endowments may struggle to make up for lost ground by the time their fiscal year ends in June.