<p>With the Fiscal Year for most colleges ending last June 30th, it’s time for year-end endowment numbers to start trickling in. The very first one I’ve seen for the new season is from the University of Virginia. A 12.5% increase in the year ending June 30, 2010. They recovered about half of the 2008-2009 losses.</p>
<p>UVimco’s annual report. Biggest gains from Resources. They seemed to have kept a fair amount of investments in liquid bonds and stocks, and not much in real estate which has served them well.</p>
<p>Harvard’s numbers are in. Still alot of work to do it looks like. Interesting comments about private equity-sounds to me like she is saying there are some PE folks with integrity that they can deal with but they have found that there are quite a few that have little integrity and as a result they are going to cut way back on the number of funds they invest with.</p>
<p>UMich hasn’t released official information, but according to Wikipedia, in 2009 it’s endowment was 6B, and was estimated at 6.7B in June 2010, so an increase of about 11.7%, which would put it at recovering about 44% of it’s losses from '08 to '09.</p>
<p>Columbia weighs in with a 17.3% return on their endowment for the year ending June 2010.</p>
<p>Investure, the Charlottesvillle outfit that provides turn-key endowment management for a number of schools including **Middlebury, Smith, Trinity, Barnard, and Dickinson **reports annual returns in the 15.2% to 17.7% range depending on each school’s exact portfolio. The Investure people cite a relative small position in real estate as a reason for their relatively high returns.</p>
<p>I’m adding as I see the reports pop up in Google alerts. Haven’t seen anything for most schools, yet. Feel free to add any schools you see report year end endowment numbers.</p>
<p>The University of Pennsylvania, the Ivy League school founded by Benjamin Franklin, said the fund that manages most of its endowment gained 13 percent in the past year, helped by investments in credit and public equities.</p>
<p>The Associated Investments Fund outperformed its benchmark by 3.6 percentage points in the year ended June 30, the university, in Philadelphia, said today in an e-mail.</p>
<p>The $5.7 billion endowment benefited from “strong double- digit returns in credit” within the absolute-return portfolio, Kristin Gilbertson, Penn’s chief investment officer, wrote in an e-mail. Penn is one of the eight private schools in the northeastern U.S. that make up the Ivy League.</p>
<p>I guess we can look for David Swenson to make another round of talk show appearances telling us how he is so much more brilliant than any other college endowment manager. Too bad Yale didn’t invest in the size of his ego. They would have certainly beat Harvard.</p>
<p>The picture I am getting is that the endowments have not even begun to dig themselves out of their hole. Endowment values are essentially flat and still highly illiquid. The one area of improvement I might concede is that their capital call committments are down.</p>
<p>The Bowdoin newspaper article cites a Cambridge Associate figure of 12.2% as the median college endowment investment return for the year ending June 2010.</p>