Top Returns at Midsize Endowments Challenge the Yale Model

When Walter Burke took over as chairman of Denison University’s investment committee in January 2009, the financial markets were in free fall. Even before his first board meeting, Burke huddled with committee members to make sense of the devastation suffered by the school’s endowment, which had dropped in value from $693 million at the end of 2007 to $536 million just 12 months later. “We decided the plan was to hunker down and focus on shoring up liquidity,” Burke says.

与大多数大学养老委员会主席不同 - 通常，校友与金融或商业背景 - 伯克是一名临床心理学家，他的大部分职业生涯都作为芝加哥西北大学Feinberg医学院精神病学院的教授。鉴于2009年1月的市场破坏，“我认为在椅子地位中有一个心理学家可能有意义，”1971年的丹尼逊班的成员和1997年以来的受托人。

It was no joke when Denison’s return came in at a dismal –19.6 percent for the academic fiscal year ended June 30, 2009. Yet the small, Granville, Ohio–based liberal arts school — with just 2,185 undergraduates — emerged from the market meltdown in better shape than Harvard University, whose once-$36.9 billion endowment lost 27.3 percent, or Yale University, which saw its $22.9 billion fund fall by 24.6 percent. Even more unexpected: Tiny Denison continued to outperform Harvard, Yale and many of the U.S.’s largest educational endowments over the next four years.

丹尼斯并不孤单。一组二级中型捐赠组，5亿美元至10亿美元的资产从2007年6月至2012年6月学校教育较大的同行。高级表演者的年度回报率从1.86％到5.36％，最靠近哈佛（每年增长1.24％）和耶鲁（上涨1.83％）。据华盛顿州的大学和大学商业人员（Nacubo）协会（Nacubo）协会称，中期恒星出售了超过10亿美元的资产超过10亿美元的中位数回报。

乍一看,人们很容易忽视outperformance of midsize endowments during the fateful 2008–’09 fiscal year as the result of being in the right place — that is, the right asset classes — at the right time. Entering the financial crisis, endowments with $500 million to $1 billion in assets had, on average, more money in fixed income and less in private equity, hedge funds and other illiquid alternatives than their larger brethren did, according to Nacubo. For big endowments“2008–2009 was a disaster,” says André Perold, co-founder and CIO of Boston-based HighVista Strategies, which manages $3.6 billion in endowment assets. Perold, an emeritus professor of finance and banking at Harvard Business School, points out that big endowments take a lot more risk to get high returns and that “there are periods when there’s a cost to that.”

查尔斯•Skorina epony的创始人和总裁mous San Francisco–based executive search firm specializing in financial services and asset management, says the successes of the smaller schools are usually overlooked because their returns are generally not reported in any prominent way. His view is supported by an October 2012 report by Vanguard Group that found that from 2009 through 2011 an investor was nearly ten times more likely to see a story about one of the ten largest endowments than to read one about any of the others. In the first half of 2013, Skorina dug into the 2012 Nacubo-Commonfund Study of Endowments (NCSE) to identify the top midsize performers — and he shared his data with亚博赞助欧冠。“为什么这么多较小的禀赋，带着更多谦虚的资源，在重量之上冲突，为什么没有人注意到？”他问。

The five years that followed the financial crisis have been challenging for all U.S. college and university endowments, which managed to eke out only low-single-digit returns. Still, Stephen Nesbitt, CEO of alternative-investment consulting firm Cliffwater, based in Marina del Rey, California, believes that more midsize schools have been positioning themselves to outperform the largest schools since the crisis. “Midsize endowments had been a little sleepy,” and 2008 was a wake-up call, explains Nesbitt, who consults with a dozen endowments averaging $750 million in assets. As a result, schools are allocating more resources to their endowments: establishing professional investment offices, changing compensation to attract and retain investment staff, upgrading investment committees and hiring top-notch consulting advice.

It turns out that great contacts and investment committees are not exclusive to the Ivy League. “How you structure your committee, who you recruit — that’s a very important, often forgotten element,” says John Griswold, executive director of Wilton, Connecticut–based Commonfund Institute, the educational arm of Commonfund, which manages $25 billion for 1,400 nonprofit organizations. “If you don’t get the governance process right, it’s going to be very difficult.”

较小的好处经常被忽视。由于资产较少可以在禀赋的青睐中工作，因为皮拉志愿者在她在缅因不伦瑞克的Bowdoin College投资高级副总裁13岁。“小型捐赠往往是必要的企业家，”劳动力在耶鲁斯·斯普伦（David Swensen）的长期CIO下工作，举行的是1996年的MBA学生，然后是1997年至2000年的全日制人员，然后搬到2000年Bowdoin。她说，小员工需要成为一般主义者，这为他们提供了许多与资产管理人员的市场知识和密切的关系。此外，当一位顶级资产经理为投资者提供500万美元的分配时，例如，一所小学可以利用投资，这将在百万美元的投资组合中放置太少的投资机构。

巨型表示，她了解到她对普伦森的捐赠管理知识的一切。但在金融危机之后五年，学生们介绍了老师：Bowdoin的捐款人数为3.10％的年度返回。随着Bowdoin等学校应用从耶鲁模型和自己的个人情况的知情经验，结果令人印象深刻。“There’s been a view that [midsize endowments] have to be more aggressive,” observes Cliffwater’s Nesbitt, who began consulting with Denison after being introduced to the school in 2005 by Jack Meyer, former head of Harvard Management Co. “If there was a skill gap between the largest and midsize endowments, it has closed significantly.”

美国大学的大学依靠养老基金来帮助涵盖运行高等教育机构的陡峭年度成本。最大的学校拥有最大的禀赋，并旨在通过雇用他们可以找到的最聪明的投资专业人士来保持这种方式。最聪明的是耶鲁·斯文文，他于1985年以来，康涅狄格州纽黑文队领导投资办公室。

斯文森开发了一种投资风格，其标志正在寻求最新的未经过的投资，然后将这些新兴的替代资产课添加到耶鲁日益多样化的投资组合中。他的2000本书，开创性的组合管理：一种非传统的机构投资方法，在每个条纹的捐赠，基金会，养老金和资产管理人员之间是一个失控的畅销书。斯文文的成功 - 数十年一贯的高回报 - 成为其他学校复制的模型。它也成了柏忌。

Following the Yale model, schools large and small began to heap alternative investments into their endowment portfolios. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2002, institutions with more than $1 billion allocated about a quarter of their portfolios to domestic equity, compared with 40 percent at midsize schools, according to NCSE. By the end of 2012, the biggest schools had halved that allocation, to 12 percent, while the midsize schools cut it even more, down to 18 percent. At the same time, allocations to alternatives, already high at 44 percent at the largest schools, increased to 61 percent; midsize schools brought their alternatives allocation from 23 percent in 2001–’02 to 48 percent in 2011–’12.

当金融危机在2009财年抨击学校时，这一切都崩溃了。最大的学校，私人伙伴关系的分配平均其投资组合的40％，被击中了最艰难的，没有足够的流动资产，以履行其对学校的经营预算，奖学金和其他必需品的义务。较小的学校，大约四分之一的资产被捆绑，有更多的机动空间。从那时起的五年中，耶鲁投资模型已被打开。

虽然斯文文在耶鲁斯占领了Cio缰绳的情况下，但一件事就是为较小的学校为他们的投资组合添加了一件事，但一件事就是为他们的投资组合增加了一件事：经理选择对投资组合表现的越来越重要。1986年，Gary Brinson，L. randolph封路和吉尔伯特蜂鸣声的精美纸张“投资组合绩效的决定因素”成立了资产配置负责90％的资金回报的长期理论。去年，在耶鲁年度捐赠报告中写作，正式承认该理论的结束。随着更多投资者对最新资产课程挤满了最新的资产课程，观察报告，退货的机会减少了。Yale’s research shows that in the 20 years ended June 30, 2012, only 20 percent of Yale’s outperformance (relative to the average endowments monitored by investment consulting firm Cambridge Associates) was attributable to portfolio asset allocation, whereas nearly 80 percent resulted from the value added by active managers.

如果雇佣顶级资产管理公司已成为关键endowment success, securing a talented CIO to head the endowment office is also critical. In October 2008, three months before psychology professor Burke took over the leadership of the investment committee at Denison, the school recruited its first CIO, aiming to professionalize its endowment management. Adele Gorrilla, a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a Goldman Sachs Group alum, was hired away from her post as director of investments at the University of Minnesota just as the financial system was crashing. “The assets had grown to a point where the committee could only do so much, and we needed to get a full-time, talented staff,” Burke explains.

Denison’s need for a healthy endowment is particularly acute given that a full 96 percent of its undergraduates receive some kind of scholarship or financial aid funded by the school. “The crisis led to some great opportunities,” says Gorrilla, who got down to work with the committee and a team of two investment professionals and one analyst.

丹尼斯CIO在使用vanenen模型的情况下具有不同的接受。而大多数捐赠观察者指向它作为资产分配配方，其中包括低于平均流动资金水平的替代投资，而Gorrilla观点主要作为捐赠领导者的榜样：“如果这意味着你是一个领导者和首先以捐赠投资的所有方式，那么它永远不会死。“2009年初，丹尼森聘请了新的管理人员，并继续将资金投入房地产和能源，并在与现有管理人员私人投资中投资。“我们看到阿黛尔和她的团队可以潜入并追捕良好的管理人员，”伯克报道。“她现在做了整个事情，”他补充道。今天，委员会对委员会的主要责任是监督Nesbitt的Cliffwater帮助的资产拨款。

“They have a very good team approach,” says Nesbitt, describing how the staff, investment committee and outside advisers work together. “Part of their solution was organizational, delegating greater authority to staff, staff pulling the trigger and flexible decision making.”

Gorrilla谦虚地发布了5年4.1％的回报，2007年-12期间中型禀赋中的第二高。“委员会的信任仍然是他们对内部团队和市场环境的信任的职能，”她说。“这不是你刚刚开启的东西。”

As endowments grow into the midsize range, it is not unusual for trustees to hand the reins of fund management to CIOs like Gorrilla and Carleton College’s Jason Matz. Despite this trend, however, there are still successful endowments run by investment committees with help from consultants or an investment director without discretion. Four such schools appear on the list of top midsize endowments: No. 1-ranked Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, in New York; Colorado College (No. 5) in Colorado Springs; Vassar College (No. 9) in Poughkeepsie, New York; and Mount Holyoke College (No. 11) in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Their success is a function of superior teamwork and access to top managers.

Mount Holyoke’s committee chairman, Betsy Palmer, agrees with Bowdoin’s Volent that being small has its advantages. “One of the advantages we have is that we don’t have to identify quite as many good managers as Harvard and Yale,” notes Palmer, speaking of the now-$623 million Holyoke endowment.

1976年，毕业于所有女性教育的最后一个堡垒之一，帕尔默，帕尔默，他也是山上霍利诺伊州受托人，强调了一个包括至少两个受托人的高度职能委员会的重要性。然而，与大多数人不同，该委员会由九名妇女和一名男子组成，当前学生的父母。“这是一个非常适合一起工作的小组，”帕尔默，哥伦比亚商学院毕业生和北美营销和伦敦投资经理Lindsell火车的客户服务负责人。“与妇女主导的委员会，这是一个不同的文化。”亚慱体育app怎么下载作为主席，帕尔默认为她的角色是确保听到每一个观点，并且所有董事会成员都参与并产生广泛意见。

The other element in Mount Holyoke’s success is its relationship with longtime consultant Cambridge Associates and a team that includes a Holyoke alumnus. The committee is currently trying to streamline the manager-hiring process, handing more discretion to its consultant. “I think the key driver for us has been manager selection,” Palmer says, referring to the endowment’s 2.6 percent annualized return over five years. With help from committee contacts, the school was early into funds at Kensico Capital Management Corp. in Greenwich, Connecticut; London-based Cedar Rock Capital; and Jack Meyer’s Convexity Capital Management in Boston.

与此同时，Vassar禁止了五年后的2.7％的年度回报率。1988年班的亨利约翰逊于2009年成为董事长，当时杰弗里戈德斯坦留下了Vassar的董事会和私募股权公司Hellman＆Friedman（自从重新进入），为此 - 财政部长Timothy Geithner工作。“我们没有一个CIO，而是一个非常活跃和有效的委员会，”Johnson表示，纽约信托信托公司国际主席委员会委员会主席委员会说。一个自我描述的“经济援助小孩”，约翰逊指出了提供奖学金支付的回报的重要性。“在投资故事中迷失的事情之一就是大学在为此从未如此更大的需求和成本时会努力努力，”他说。

Johnson credits much of Vassar’s success to an investment committee that includes Christianna Wood, former senior investment officer at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System; Steven Tananbaum, managing partner and CIO of GoldenTree Asset Management; Robert Tanenbaum, a partner in Maryland real estate firm Lerner Enterprises and an owner of the Washington Nationals baseball team; and John Arnhold, chairman and CIO of New York–based First Eagle Investment Management.

约翰逊对Vassar回归的来源非常清楚。“我认为戴夫·斯文文所说和经常被遗忘的伟大事物之一是，耶鲁型号为耶鲁斯建造了耶鲁斯，”他指出。“它对每个人都不适合。”没有医院或主要体育计划，以产生收入，只有8亿美元的资产，Vassar不能带到更大的学校的风险。With help from Anne Casscells of Menlo Park, California– and New York–based Aetos Capital on marketable alternatives, which make up close to a quarter of the total portfolio, and Commonfund’s Susan Carter on the private portfolio, targeted at 10 percent, Vassar has taken a more conservative view on sources of return.

Despite having a team of consultants that includes Russell Investments for long-only asset allocation, Johnson believes that endowment portfolios are largely in the hands of economic fate. “In a period of robust growth and stability in the global economy, schools like Harvard and Yale will thrive,” he says. “In periods of uncertainty schools that are more defensive will do well.”

华莱士威特was a value investor, even before he opened the doors of Weitz Investment Management in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1983. Today, Weitz oversees $5.3 billion in mutual funds just five miles down the road from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, whose shares he has held for 35 years. According to Chicago-based data provider Morningstar, the $913 million Weitz Partners III Opportunity Fund delivered an annualized return of 15.87 percent for the five years ended August 31, 2013, putting it in the No. 1 position in its midcap fund universe.

Weitz also oversees a $650 million pool of assets unrelated to his firm. As chairman of the Carleton College investment committee since July 2003, the 1970 graduate — who met his wife at the Northfield, Minnesota, school and sent their three children there — has had a hand in his alma mater’s top performance. Carleton’s 2.6 percent annualized return for the five years ended June 2012 placed it above the 1.2 percent median for schools the same size.

回到2000年，当威特占投资委员会席位时，小型文学学院大量投资于技术股票。与有技术的捐赠者一样，Carleton升级退货，2000年的24.7％达到了达到峰值，而那一年的Nacubo Universe的12％的中位数返回相比。然后，科技泡沫于2000年3月爆发，卡尔顿的捐赠额从2000财年的6.81亿美元下降到452万美元的低点。“我们持有股票过长，在排名的底部几年，随后有五年的平均回报，”韦茨召回。“在图表顶部后，它是创伤性的。”

威迪兹没有丢失课程。在查看外包禀赋之类的选择之后，并与D. Ellen Shuman和Carnegie Corp.的CIO和耶鲁省捐赠者，在2004年，学校聘请了它的第一个Cio，Jason Matz。Carleton还聘请了咨询公司Hammond Associates（由Mercer于2009年收购），其任务跨越了向投资办公室的两年过渡。为了使新的模型工作，投资文化必须从委员会转变为私人市场负责人的经理选择和投资组合的酌情亚慱体育app怎么下载决定，允许自行决定。Matz解释道，委员会成员“想触摸并感受到经理人离开董事会。

“We can help Jason have the courage to lean against the wind and the courage to do things that don’t look popular,” Weitz says. “That includes giving him cover to rebalance away from strategies that are working and adding more to those that are unpopular or scary.”

通过自由来重新分配投资组合，Matz将其更加符合较大的学校，但停止私密，非功率合作伙伴关系的超大块。他从2004年3月的61％削减了2004年3月的35％，从2013年6月的35％。私募股权从12％增加到18％，固定收入从20％降至7％，而市场替代方案则从8％提高到29％（现在传播九个对冲基金）。启动了一个实际资产的投资组合，占总数的10％。

在回报方面必须有一个平衡，并且需要做每个学校最好的事情，警告Weitz。20个中型学校中的大部分依赖于其年度经营预算的30％的捐赠。“如果你在错误的比赛中竞争，你可能会达到错误的地方，”他说。但Weitz承认，避免在学校的竞争中避免鉴于排名的压力很难U.S. News & World Report一年一度的“最佳大学”，其中一个标准是“每个学生的捐赠”。

There are finer points of the Swensen model that work for smaller schools. Weitz points out that asset classes have streaks and Swensen is good at rebalancing. “It’s all about rebalancing to take advantage of the bargains,” he says. “It’s not just if you have a Noah’s ark of asset classes that you win.”

For his part, Matz believes that Carleton’s success — its ability to bounce back from a steep 19.2 percent loss in 2002 to the top of the charts by June 2012 — rests on manager selection. “If you’re not able to source superior managers who put the intent of the client ahead of themselves, if you’re not in the network, you’re probably going to get into trouble,” says Matz, pointing to the fact that only one of Carleton’s then-14 hedge funds gated the school’s assets that it had in that fund in 2008.

Manager selection is also key at Bowdoin, where CIO Volent has carved out a special place in the portfolio for what she calls a farm team. In a formalized, now-ten-year-old program, she has invested with small, emerging managers, mostly hedge funds that spin out of larger firms. “A big university may not be able to do that,” Volent notes. “It’s a rounding error for them.” Whereas many large hedge funds have become institutionalized, smaller managers are hungrier. “That’s driven a lot of our returns,” she adds.

Volent was the first investment professional when she was hired in 2000. As the Bowdoin portfolio has grown, the school has added staff, most recently opening a satellite office in New York to cover real estate, hedge funds and private equity; Volent can be found there two days a week. “If you are Harvard or Yale, investment managers are coming to see you all the time,” she explains. “If you are in Brunswick, Maine, you’re not going to see the flow.” Like most of the top midsize endowments, Bowdoin is responsible for providing 30 percent of the school’s annual operating budget, making liquidity a top concern. “Our focus is on capital preservation and accessing really good managers,” says Volent.

Unlike schools with CIOs or committee-led investment programs, some midsize institutions have chosen to outsource portfolio management. Although outsourcing has been gaining popularity, only two of the top 20 midsize endowments outsource their investment offices: Middlebury College (No. 4) and the University of Colorado Foundation (No. 20).

Outsourcing sends a strong signal that schools want to follow the traditional Yale model, which requires greater resources than a midsize endowment can muster. The number of outsourced CIOs, or OCIOs, has grown with the demand. What started as a trickle in 2003, when Alice Handy left her CIO position at the University of Virginia to found Investure, has almost a decade later reached a flood, with some 50 firms identifying themselves as OCIOs, according to Darien, Connecticut–based consulting firm Casey, Quirk & Associates. Among the latest OCIOs are Matthew Wright, who vacated Vanderbilt University’s CIO spot earlier this year to set up Disciplina Group in Nashville, and Shuman, who with Nina Scherago, former deputy CIO at the Investment Fund for Foundations, is currently in the process of building out Edgehill Endowment Partners in New Haven.

The OCIO business has become very competitive, and services vary widely. Whereas the early firms followed Handy’s original model of individualized attention to a small group of schools and foundations, today’s OCIOs will accept all or just a portion of endowment portfolios and include the largest money managers, such as J.P. Morgan Asset Management, where $40 billion in endowment and foundation assets are overseen by practice head Monica Issar. According to research conducted by Commonfund, by June 30, 2012, 38 percent of colleges and universities were outsourcing some or all of their endowment portfolios, for fees that ranged from 0.3 percent to 1.0 percent of their assets under management.

科罗拉多州大学基金会于2009年正式开外包，当时克里斯托弗·贝特曼（Christopher Bittman）被纽约的Perella Weinberg Partners聘请了Ocio实践。科罗拉多州的1.86％的五年回报率为7.7亿美元的资产刚刚吱吱作响的1.83％的回报，但稳固地高于最大捐赠的1.7％的中位数回报。留在丹佛办事处的贝特曼，最近拿起了一个新的客户，这是一个新的美国大学的ASU基金会，该大学负责监督5.53亿美元的亚利桑那州立大学捐赠。根据ASU基金会的弗吉尼亚·福尔茨，财务主管和首席财务官，七会议七人的ASU投资委员会认为其时间可能会更好地花费讨论资产配置的更高层次概念，支出和投资政策以及全球市场影响而不是当天 -基金的今天管理。Foltiz自己的时间受到包括对本组织的金融业务负责的多种作用的限制，包括报告，资金，债务管理，风险管理，规划和预算，薪酬和福利，礼品报告，建筑运营和六个子公司组织的监督。她还指出了不断增加的灵活性投资决策需求。

佛蒙特州的明德,3.5 percent annualized return over the five-year period, was an early adopter of the outsourcing model when it selected Handy to be its OCIO. Churchill Franklin, an emeritus Middlebury board and investment committee member who now holds a nonvoting seat on the committee, continues to be pleased with the decision. “You can only make this kind of change at certain points,” says Franklin, CEO of Acadian Asset Management in Boston. That point was reached at Middlebury when the head of the investment committee moved on to become chairman of the board of trustees.

根据2013年初的Greenwich Associates Report的报告称，外包仍然是学校的一项非常困难的决定。根据日常控制的投降，对30个捐赠和基金会的研究发现了30个捐赠和基金会的研究投资过程。其他担忧包括对成本的不确定性，关于监督和监测的担忧，可能缺乏收费，担心违反信托责任，基金与OCIO之间的地理距离以及潜在的利益冲突以及潜在的利益冲突。

Regardless of whether smaller schools go the OCIO, investment office or committee route, Carleton’s Weitz is sanguine about their chances to outperform, as long as their investment teams avoid getting carried away with the latest hot idea and stick with quality investments, even if they are not working at the time. “I don’t despair of keeping up investmentwise with the Harvards,” he says. “There’s more to endowments than investment size.”

Perhaps the most vocal believer in the ability of midsize schools to be successful with their own version of the Yale model is Cliffwater’s Nesbitt. “You’ve got a lot of good talent at the midlevel now,” he explains. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the group of 20 does better than the Ivies in the next five years.” • •

阅读更多关于在伴侣作品中的大学和大学捐赠者的更多信息，“成功捐赠投资的规模事项吗？”

Read more onendowments and foundations。