Yale University, one of the top academic institutions in the world, has the second largest endowment in the United States. It has announced that the value of the fund surged 12.3% to $24.9 billion. The number is for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2018, compared to the previous fiscal year. Harvard posted much worse results, as the value of its endowment rose only 10% to $39.2 billion

Behind Harvard and Yale, third on the list of endowment size, the University of Texas system had an endowment of just over $26 billion for the year that ended in mid-2017, the latest period for which most data are available. Stamford was next with an endowment near $26 billion, followed by Princeton at nearly $24 billion. In all, 10 universities had endowments over $10 billion. Among these, the gain in value ran from 4.2% to 14.0%. These returns are most affected by the assets in which universities invest their money, which runs a gamut from stocks and bonds to venture capital investment.

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Endowments serve universities in several ways. They can be used to cover upkeep of campus infrastructures, pay professors, underwrite research or provide funds for scholarships. In Harvard’s case, 36% of the university’s expenses in the most recent year were covered by endowment distributions of almost $1.8 billion.

According to the 2017 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments, which tracks endowments of the largest financial institutions in the United States and Canada, 100 of them had total endowments of over $1 billion.

Institution	City	State	2017 Endowment	2016 Endowment
Harvard University	Boston	MA	$36.02 billion	$34.54 billion
Yale University	New Haven	CT	$27.18 billion	$25.41 billion
The University of Texas System	Austin	TX	$26.54 billion	$24.20 billion
Stanford University	Stanford	CA	$24.78 billion	$22.40 billion
Princeton University	Princeton	NJ	$23.81 billion	$22.15 billion
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Cambridge	MA	$14.97 billion	$13.43 billion
University of Pennsylvania	Philadelphia	PA	$12.21 billion	$10.72 billion
The Texas A&M University System	College Station	TX	$11.56 billion	$10.54 billion
University of Michigan	Ann Arbor	MI	$10.94 billion	$9.74 billion
Northwestern University	Evanston	IL	$10.44 billion	$9.65 billion
Columbia University	New York	NY	$10.00 billion	$9.04 billion
The University of California	Oakland	CA	$9.79 billion	$8.34 billion
University of Notre Dame	Notre Dame	IN	$9.35 billion	$8.37 billion
Duke University	Durham	NC	$7.91 billion	$6.84 billion
Washington University in St. Louis	St. Louis	MO	$7.86 billion	$7.06 billion
The University of Chicago	Chicago	IL	$7.52 billion	$7.00 billion
Emory University	Atlanta	GA	$6.91 billion	$6.40 billion
Cornell University	Ithaca	NY	$6.76 billion	$5.97 billion
University of Virginia	Charlottesville	VA	$6.39 billion	$5.85 billion
Rice University	Houston	TX	$5.81 billion	$5.32 billion
University of Southern California	Los Angeles	CA	$5.13 billion	$4.61 billion

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