Columbia Investments Rise 17%, Beating Harvard Fund

Columbia University’s investments rose 17 percent in the past year, beating gains of Harvard University, the world’s richest school, and the returns of a broad group of institutions for the second year in a row.

The university’s endowment, valued at about $6.5 billion as of June 30 after gifts and spending, rose an average of 7.9 percent annually in the past five years, Robert Hornsby, a spokesman for New York-based Columbia, said today in an e-mail. That compares with a 4.7 percent gain at Harvard and a 3.1 percent increase for institutions tracked by Wilshire Associates Inc., a consulting firm in Santa Monica, California.