Yale sells up to $6B of its PE portfolio amid federal funding challenge
secondariesinvestor.com
secondariesinvestor.com
> the endowment’s value increased to $41.4 billion on June 30, 2024, up from $40.7 billion on June 30, 2023
https://news.yale.edu/2024/10/25/yale-reports-investment-ret...
> Yale’s investment strategy depends heavily on alternative investments. As of 2019, they made up about 60 percent of Yale’s portfolio.
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/10/24/yales-endowment-ex...
https://cepr.net/publications/private-equity-university-endo...
https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/pitchbooks-university-en...
> So, how did the endowments fare? Pitchbook reports that the 50 largest university endowments saw an annual return of 8.3 percent over the past 10 years. And how did a plain vanilla 60-40 Vanguard mutual fund (60 percent stocks, 40 percent bonds) do? It returned 8.38 percent over the same period without the added risk of speculative investments in risky private assets.
> Let that sink in. Endowment funds got no extra payoff for investing in private equity funds or other private assets.
> The lesson? US endowment funds could have made the same return by joining with millions of ordinary people and investing in a plain vanilla mutual fund.
Aside, I tried to copy the title to search for context about this elsewhere:
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Well, that's... something. No ma'am, I don't think I will.
For how much students pay and how many wealthy donors they have, why are tax payers funding Yale?
This is probably one of the rare times I support a funding cut.
All universities are research institutions and the funding at issue are research grants.
> For how much students pay and how many wealthy donors they have, why are tax payers funding Yale?
Students pay basically for the costs associated with having students at the university, but that's not the primary function of the university.
> This is probably one of the rare times I support a funding cut.
Yeah, I mean, if you qant to slit the throat of progress in all fields of science, that makes a lot of sense.
Making blue collar workers pay taxes to fund elite education for nepotism-babies seems like something bad.
When people talk about federal funding we are talking about research funding. The NSF decides that they want to fund research on topic X for reason Y. They put a call for grant applications. Labs submit grant applications and the NSF chooses the ones they think are most valuable. Those labs get money to pay for faculty and grad student salaries and lab equipment. The labs perform the research and publish it for the broader societal good.