Where We Are Now and What To Do About It
A look at where things are and what steps investors should take if/when the crisis returns.
Investment Planning
Reversal of Fortune: The Effect of the Market Decline on the Budgets of Endowed Institutions
This paper describes the circumstances surrounding the accelerated rise of expenses at many institutions with large endowments during the unprecedented market rise of the 1990s, and the budgetary implications of the three-year decline in the equity markets, not seen since 1941. A section entitled “What to Do?” offers suggestions for dealing with the budgetary consequences…
Assessing Strategic Strengths: An Introduction
This primer describes 12 key financial indicators useful in monitoring a college or university’s ability to provide for future generations of students.
Endowment Spending in a Bear Market
Three suggestions for institutions whose spending rules now dictate a cut in spending.
How Will You Earn What You Spend?
This short paper reviews asset class valuations and offers summary asset allocation recommendations.
Asset Allocation in the Bear Market
This paper speculates that while some of the excess from the equity bubble years has been worked off, the secular bottom will probably not arrive until valuations improve and despair reaches levels proportional to the preceding bull market euphoria.
Benchmarking
This report suggests preconditions to the selection of appropriate benchmarks and the flaws inherent even in careful selection. Discrete sections for public market investments, marketable alternatives, private equity, and real estate are included.
Preserving Purchasing Power in a Difficult Environment
This short paper reviews asset class valuations and offers summary asset allocation recommendations.
Price Competition in Higher Education
The reasons most commonly cited for the seemingly inexorable slide toward the financial abyss are the relentless competition for high position in college rankings such as those invented by U.S. News & World Report; competition from taxpayer-subsidized public universities; and the inclination of even relatively affluent parents to bargain for more financial aid. Most at…
The Growing Importance of Endowment
Our data suggest that colleges with proportionally more endowment enjoy stronger pricing power and greater capacity to bridge the widening gap between operating revenues and expenditures. At the same time, the abrupt end to the sustained 1990s bull market increases the prospect that volatility in investment returns may put endowment support of operations at greater…