Barry Ritholtz, Columnist

Ivy League Endowments Make the Same Old Mistakes

Hedge funds and natural resources underperformed. New investments in private equity look no better.

October 9, 2019 at 11:00 AM UTC

Barry Ritholtz is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, and was previously chief market strategist at Maxim Group. He is the author of “Bailout Nation.”

But can it beat the market.
Photographer: Craig Warga/Bloomberg

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The latest university endowment return data dribbling out for the fiscal year ended June 30 is not pretty.

Earlier return estimates of 8.7% for the Ivy League were too optimistic. Harvard’s endowment gained 6.5%, while Yale’s had an increase of just 5.7%; the University of Pennsylvania endowment gained 6.5%; Dartmouth yielded 7.5%; Brown, the smallest of the Ivy endowments at $4 billion, was a performance outlier at 12.4% (Princeton, Cornell and Columbia have yet to report). Other notable endowment returns include Massachusetts Institute of Technology at 8.8%, Stanford at 6.5% and Duke at 6.9%.1