<p>flat overall</p>
<p>[College</a> and University Endowments, 2011-12 - Administration - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/CollegeUniversity/136933/]College”>http://chronicle.com/article/CollegeUniversity/136933/)</p>
<p>Well, you learn something new every day.</p>
<h1>88 Brookings Institution up 206.6%</h1>
<p>Yeah…most of these endowments didn’t do too well. The endowments must be doing better so far in fiscal 2013.</p>
<p>So, Harvard of Harvard Business School did much worse than Ohio State?</p>
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<p>Yes, but the raw numbers can be misleading. Ohio State’s 11.7% gain from $2.12 billion to $2.37 billion could easily have been the result of a single big $250 million gift to endowment. If someone drops a $250 million gift on Harvard, it registers as a 0.8% gain in endowment assets. We don’t know from these figures whether Ohio State had a better ROI than Harvard did. And even if they did, it’s not clear they can sustain it over time. So as impressive as Ohio State’s gain is, I’m not going to read too much into it without seeing a lot more detail and longer term trends.</p>