Little Good News for the Little Ivies

Sophisticated endowment investment strategies didn’t help liberal arts schools last year.

Graduates in the class of 2016 pose for a picture at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
Photographer: Cloe Poisson/AP

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By Michael McDonald and Kate Smith

December 22, 2016 at 10:05 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the December 26, 2016 issue of businessweek.

Beyond the Ivy League, there’s a group of prestigious, mostly smaller colleges spread across the Northeast U.S. These private schools count many top financial professionals among their alumni and donors. But having access to Wall Street’s best and brightest is no guarantee of winning investment results for college endowments—especially not amid the global market volatility that dominated the schools’ recently reported fiscal year, which ended June 30.

Over those 12 months, a group of 18 liberal arts schools sometimes dubbed “Little Ivies” lost an average of 3.3 percent. That trailed the 2.5 percent average loss posted by 450 endowments tracked by Cambridge Associates. The eight Ivy League schools were down 0.8 percent on average in the same period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.