Princeton U. Endowment Up 19.6 Percent, Valued at $21 Billion

Nassau Hall PrincetonPrinceton University’s endowment earned a 19.6 percent investment gain Princeton endowment earned 19.6 percent return for the fiscal year that ended June 30 and was valued at $21 billion, an increase of about $2.8 billion from the previous year, school officials announced.

The Princeton University Investment Co., the University office that manages the endowment, certified the results at its director meeting Oct. 16. The 10-year average return on the endowment, which grew to 10.5 percent, places Princeton University’s endowment among the top percentile of 520 institutions reporting to the Trust Universe Comparison Service.

“The strong performance reflected in our 10-year average return is crucial to our ability to sustain the excellence of our teaching and research mission and to continue providing generous financial aid that makes Princeton’s education affordable to any student who is admitted,” Provost David Lee said. “This is important as we enhance our efforts to increase the economic diversity of our undergraduate population.”

Princeton’s scholarship spending has outpaced fee increases for 13 of the last 14 years, school officials said. Early this year, Princeton University trustees approved an 8.5 percent increase in undergraduate financial aid to $131.6 million in the University’s operating budget for 2014-15. Lee  said Princeton will continue to look for ways to carry out its activities more efficiently in order to “create the capacity both to respond to new external budgetary pressures and to generate new opportunities for research and learning.”

2 Comments

  1. This isn’t something I’d be particularly proud of considering they could have spent $9.99 to with an online broker to invest that sum in an S&P500 ETF and returned approximately 22% over the same period.

    Instead they probably shelled out millions to someone who wasted the funds on cuts to middlemen/squids in the hedge fund industry to produce a lower return whilst padding their own net worth.

    Sad. Investment 101 and STILL all these supposedly smart people overpaying for underperformance. Come to think of it, you could have had a monkey throw 500 darts at a board full of stockticker symbols and it would have done better too.

    1. Maybe, or at least this year, but when I worked at PU, the staff always wondered why their TIAA-CREF retirement funds never did as well as PU, when the annual PRINCO report came out. 😉

Comments are closed.