<p>While that is true, nervous, it’s still a tough financial situation, because the more you spend of the endowment, the harder it is to recover. If Yale were to start dipping farther into the endowment for yearly operating expenses, you very quickly get to a place where the endowment is in a slow death spiral. Even if it were to only do this for 2 years, you’d have the endowment down to $11 billion, with the expectation from everyone (students, staff, prof) that you can still have a $2.7 billion budget the next year. So you need to have about a 25% return on your investment/endowment to be able to afford this, or the whole thing starts to fall apart, since with each year the endowment will get lower, requiring an even more miraculous investment scheme to keep it from tanking. Swenson has got us over that 20% mark, but there are some miracles even he can’t pull off, especially given the market conditions in the near future.</p>