Harvard got a new president, Lawrence Bacow, on July 1, arriving as we are grapple with inequality as a nation. In the June issue of The Atlantic, Matthew Stewart wrote about the new aristocracy. They aren’t the plutocrats who control 0.1% of American wealth, but rather the aristocrats who control the next 9.9%. That would… [Read More]
Blog
Tag: endowment management
Paying for College: The Sweet Briar Conspiracy Theory
I’ve been writing a lot of about college finances, most recently for Belt, and most of the stories of trouble colleges follow a predictable combination of enrollment dropoff and financial shortfall. The announced closing of Sweet Briar College in early 2015 deviated from this. Enrollment was declining, but the financial position was okay. What was… [Read More]
The Basics of Social Impact Bonds
There’s an interesting new development in the endless search for yield: the Social Impact Bond. The idea is that the bond will finance a charitable program, and the investors will be repaid if the program hits its goals. There’s a lot of talk about it, although very few of these bonds have actually been issued,… [Read More]
Paying for College: The 2012 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments
The annual NACUBO-Commonfund report on college and university endowment values is out. The value of each endowment includes the effect of investment returns, spending, and donations through June 2012, and, on average, it was negative: the average endowment posted a return of -0.3 percent (net of fees) for the year, a decline from the 19.2 average… [Read More]