Columbia Endowment Return of 3.8% Is Lowest in Ivy League So Far
Columbia Endowment Return of 3.8% Is Lowest in Ivy League So Far
(Bloomberg) -- Columbia’s endowment, which is smarting from turnover of its leadership, posted the lowest return so far among Ivy League rivals.
The university returned 3.8% in fiscal 2019, it said in a statement Tuesday. That compares with 9% in 2018. Seven of eight Ivy League schools have reported.
Columbia lost its longtime chief executive officer, N. P. “Narv” Narvekar, to Harvard in 2016. Last month, the school in New York announced that Timothy Donohue resigned after about 11 years, the last three as chief investment officer.
The endowment, which manages $10.95 billion, is overseen by CEO Peter Holland. It has returned an annual average of 10.2% over the last decade, according to the statement.
“While we are disappointed that this year’s results were below our benchmarks for our target asset allocation, the longer term results reflect Columbia’s ability to perform across a range of market conditions,” University President Lee C. Bollinger said in the statement.
Brown University is leading the Ivies this year, returning 12.4%. Princeton, which had the best returns a year ago, will be the last school to report.
As the chart shows, performance has slipped across the board at big endowments.
School | FY 2019 | FY 2018 |
| Brown* | 12.4% | 13.2% |
| Bowdoin | 10.9 | 15.7 |
| MIT | 8.8 | 13.5 |
| U California | 8.2 | 8.9 |
| Michigan State | 7.9 | 11.1 |
| Penn State | 7.7 | 7.8 |
| Dartmouth* | 7.5 | 12.2 |
| NC State | 7.3 | 11.4 |
| U Oklahoma | 7.3 | 10 |
| Duke | 6.9 | 12.9 |
| U Pennsylvania* | 6.5 | 12.9 |
| Stanford | 6.5 | 11.3 |
| Harvard* | 6.5 | 10 |
| Yale* | 5.7 | 12.3 |
| Cornell* | 5.3 | 10.6 |
| Columbia* | 3.8 | 9 |
Note: Fiscal year ends June 30; * Ivy League
school
To contact the reporters on this story: Michael McDonald in Boston at mmcdonald10@bloomberg.net;Janet Lorin in New York at jlorin@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Mirabella at amirabella@bloomberg.net, Vincent Bielski, Melissa Karsh
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