In this paper, we have sought to understand what has been the performance of university endowments, and what drives the observed pattern of performance. Our key observations are as follows: (a) the endowments of elite universities have grown dramatically faster than endowments overall; (b)...

We analyze the returns earned by US educational endowments using style attribution models. For the average endowment, models with only public stock and bond benchmarks explain virtually all of the time-series variation in returns, yield no alpha, and generate sensible factor loadings. Elite...