The choice of benchmark for private equity and venture capital (PE/VC) continues to be the most impactful decision when it comes to evaluating an endowment’s return versus its policy portfolio benchmark. In recent years where public equity markets outperformed private strategies, benchmarking PE/VC to a public index resulted in a high bar for a diversified endowment to clear. This section summarizes the various approaches that endowments use for benchmarking total portfolio performance and compares endowment performance versus policy benchmark returns.

Since 2022, shifts in asset allocation trends have been more muted compared to much of prior history. The average peer allocation to public equities has increased a bit over this timeframe, but it is not because endowments are changing their asset allocation policies to invest more heavily in public assets. In fact, our surveys from each of the last three years show that there have been more endowments lowering their long-term targets to public equity compared to the number raising their targets. This section covers this and other topics, such as the number of external investment managers and the types of investment vehicles used.

Our annual report summarizes returns, asset allocation, and other investment-related data for 157 college and university endowments for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025.

There were multiple paths to be a top-performing endowment in fiscal year 2025. Many top quartile performers had high allocations to public equities, which makes sense, given the outperformance of these assets in the overall capital market landscape. Meanwhile, other top performers were among the highest allocators to private investments in our universe and earned strong returns from alternative strategies. Overall, most endowments again reported double-digit returns in fiscal year 2025. This section highlights the performance story of the past year and looks at results over longer-term periods.

The private equity and venture capital (PE/VC) benchmark continues to be the most impactful decision when evaluating an endowment’s return versus its policy portfolio benchmark. With public equity markets outperforming private strategies in recent years, the use of a public index to represent PE/VC in a benchmark has resulted in a high bar for a diversified endowment to clear—a position that most respondents are in. This section summarizes the various approaches that endowments use for benchmarking total portfolio performance and compares endowment performance versus policy benchmark returns.

Shifts in asset allocation trends since 2022 have been more muted compared to much of prior history. The average peer allocation to public equities has increased a bit over this timeframe, but our analyses show this is not because endowments are changing their asset allocation policies to invest more heavily in public assets. This section covers this and other topics, such as the number of external investment managers and the types of investment vehicles used.

Annual spending from endowments has grown at a much higher rate than endowment asset values since 2022. The result has been a steady uptick in the effective spending rate for portfolios over this timeframe. Over the longer term, most endowments have earned more than enough to replenish spending and offset the loss in purchasing power due to inflation. This section contains analysis on this and other statistics related to the financial support that C&Us receive from their endowments.