On Feb 9, 2007, at 9:50 AM, John Costello wrote:
> On 2/9/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>> [University endowments are weird things - they accumulate,
>> accumulate, to god knows exactly what end. Love the math at the end
>> of this.]
>
>> That's
>> enough money to pay the yearly tuition for 858,794 students—more than
>> 500 years of freshmen. (And, apparently, freshwomen!)
>
> Which means that if they would 0.8% ROI, undergrads could go there
> for free.
Which, of course, they beat many times over - the Harvard (and Yale) endowments consistently beat the market by a wide margin. (Harvard famously shorted Enron, and made big bucks off it, while the University of California lost big bucks by merely being long a fashionable stock.) How they do this is a bit of a mystery, since it's supposed to be impossible over the long term, as their business school faculties no doubt tells their finance students. Maybe they're just very very smart. Or maybe having alums in influential positions has its benefits.
Doug