Economy
Yale Endowment Hits $24.9 Billion Record High, Beating Harvard’s Growth
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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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