除了哈佛大学的剑桥，马萨诸塞州的坎布里奇，校园，校园的Halwowed Halls，毗邻Allston的Charles River，毗邻哈佛大学商学院，谎言占地面积为8.5英亩的建筑工地。What was once to be a $1.2 billion, 537,000-square-foot science complex — the first step in a grandiose 50-year plan to expand the famed university’s already sizable footprint — is now an eyesore, a gaping hole that residents claim has sent rats scurrying into their neighborhood. That’s because, after years of double-digit investment returns, Harvard lost a stunning $10 billion during the 12 months ended June 30, 2009, from its once–$36 billion endowment fund.
Harvard is far from alone. In the past year, amid the worst economic downturn in decades, the ten largest U.S. endowment funds lost a combined $36 billion. Yale University’s $16.3 billion endowment, second in size only to Harvard’s, lost $5.6 billion on its investments. The endowments of Stanford and Princeton universities, which now each have about $12 billion in assets, saw their holdings drop in value by $3.5 billion and $3.7 billion, respectively.
Although virtually every college and university suffered during the devastating bear market — with an average loss of 19 percent in the fiscal year ended June 30, according to the Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service — the biggest were generally hit the hardest, thanks in large part to their unmitigated devotion to alternative investments, especially private equity and hedge funds. To make matters worse, many schools had grown dependent on using earnings from their endowments to cover as much as half of their operating budgets, as well as to help fund building projects like Harvard’s science complex. So as markets tanked in 2008, schools had to resort to dumping public equities at fire-sale prices or shopping their private equity holdings for pennies on the dollar. Many had little fixed income and cash to fall back on, even as hedge funds erected gates to prevent redemptions, further squeezing their liquidity.
“你可能会说,某些学校下降太多in love with alternatives,” says Thruston Morton III, a former CEO of Duke Management Co., which manages the endowment of $4.6 billion Duke University, and now head of Global Endowment Management, a Charlotte, North Carolina, investment advisory firm.
The fallout has been fast and furious. Hundreds of universities across the U.S. have put building projects on hold, closed classes, fired staff, frozen salaries and scaled back benefits. Harvard, for example, eliminated 275 jobs this year in addition to halting construction in Allston. Yale reduced staff salaries and other nonpersonnel costs by 12.5 percent and froze several hundred job vacancies. Princeton, which chose to skip a transfer of funds from its endowment to its operating budget last spring, convinced 145 staff members to take early retirement as part of a two-year, $170 million (13 percent) budget cut and is now facing further staff reductions. Stanford has laid off 412 staff members, and 60 more people will lose their jobs by the end of the year.
一些学校做了以前不可思议的并发出债务，以弥补他们的投资组合中的损失，并帮助涵盖一些费用。哈佛首先是去年12月漂浮有15亿美元的应税债券，普林斯顿和斯坦福大学在今年年初加入，每个债券发布了10亿美元。当大多数学生都回家夏季休息时，布朗大学，芝加哥大学，康奈尔大学，约翰霍普金斯大学和范德比尔特大学纷纷纷纷纷纷审视债券1亿美元至5亿美元。
鉴于美国跨越大学的大学损失 - 以及随后的削减和争先恐后地筹集现金 - 这是可以理解的，有些人已经开始质疑长期耶鲁大学Cio David Swensen开创的高度多元化的禀赋投资模式。当然，随着市场起跑者和流动性干涸的市场，捐赠的捐赠者的薪酬迅速崩溃了。然而，尽管造成破坏，但养老部门和其他行业专家之间几乎存在普遍的协议，该模型非常活跃。但大多数人都同意金融危机导致学校重新思考他们如何实施模型，并重新评估养老基金在其机构的经营预算和资本项目中发挥作用。
“捐赠模式没有死亡，”哈佛大学教授肯定乔希•·勒纳（Josh Lerner）是关于斯文文和耶鲁大学投资办公室的25页案例研究。“但学校并没有让好危机浪费。这是一个可以查看他们的成本结构及其投资组合的机会，并评估他们是否应该以不同的方式做某事。“
The biggest challenge for schools will be how they reposition themselves in the unrelentingly dour economic environment. Liquidity is now front and center. Schools have sold off listed securities, taking their losses, and replaced them with short-term notes and good old cash. Those with enough clout have convinced their private equity managers to delay capital calls; the others have had to sell their holdings into the secondary market at depressed prices to free up cash for school operations. Harvard CIO Jane Mendillo, for one, has said that she is going to reduce her endowment’s 13 percent allocation to private equity, as well as bring more of the assets in-house to ensure greater liquidity and transparency.
风险管理也恢复了变迁。在北卡罗来纳州温斯顿塞勒姆的韦克森林大学，新的Cio James Dunn正在实施套期保值，如使用衣领锁定收益并保护下行。他还在评估他的学校的支出模式，在美好的时期将资金放在更精简的时期，并建立资产负债框架，这是一项长期培养的战略。大多数捐赠人士都说，管理风险的关键是更充分理解它，使用指标和压力测试，这些测试看看整个潜在的结果以及将它们跨越所有资产和负债。
阴暗中有明亮的斑点。在金融危机之前，像密歇根大学，巴黎圣母院和宾夕法尼亚大学等学校已经秉承自己的方式，通过复制弗伦文模型来认识到预测巨大回报的限制。例如，Penn Cio Kristin Gilbertson慢慢地进入了替代资产，这主要是因为她认为他们被高估了，让额外的现金手头以防止经济衰退。现在，宾夕法尼亚州的学校很好地利用其他投资者的现金仰卧起坐，并将资金存入公共和私人市场，以吸引人的估值。
许多学院和大学都是自己投资成功的受害者。根据波士顿的咨询公司剑桥员工，其大型养老金客户的62个赢得了2008年12月31日，2008年12月31日的年度返回的年度返回，容易击败了70％股票的传统投资组合和30债券百分比，同期每年上涨9.3％。由于Coffers膨胀，学校开始慷慨地消费，以吸引学生，从捐助者以及政府研究拨款中吸引学生和不断增加的美元。他们摇晃的薪水队吸引摇滚明星教师，建造了专业品质的体育场，攀岩墙，奥运大小的泳池和毛绒宿舍。
Washington lawmakers also had a hand in feeding the spending frenzy. In early 2008, Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Max Baucus of Montana sent questionnaires to 136 institutions with $500 million-plus endowments. They were concerned about the fact that these schools had amassed mountains of cash without paying taxes, a situation that as the ranking members of the Senate Finance Committee they are in a position to change. Worried about potentially losing their tax-free status, many colleges went on a preemptive spending spree, increasing their financial aid programs in hopes of appeasing Washington.
One critical challenge for many schools will be to break their dependence on using endowment earnings to pay for operations. “The real question is whether schools were too extravagant in the first place,” asserts Edgar Barksdale, CEO of Federal Street Partners, a Stamford, Connecticut–based alternative investment firm, and a board member of Duke Management. “Most corporations have reassessed the growth and expansion plans they put together before the crisis. Educational institutions must do the same thing.”
在2006年退休之前，在波士顿马萨诸塞州理工学院管理现年的艾伦Bufferd（Massachusetts Technoloce）捐赠超过30亿美元，表示，学校官员面临着艰难的选择：“你可以增加其他来源的收入，或者你可以减少支出。“
在养老管理——ci的黑暗时代rca 1985 — portfolios were a tiny fraction of the size they are today and were overseen mostly by outside advisers or banks. That year, Yale hired Swensen, convincing the then-31-year-old former Ph.D. student of Nobel Prize–winning Yale economist James Tobin to forgo a potentially lucrative career on Wall Street to take over the university’s $1 billion portfolio of stocks and bonds. The new Yale CIO quickly identified previously arcane investments like hedge funds and private equity as separate asset classes that he believed belonged in institutional portfolios in increasingly greater quantities. Swensen was convinced that these asset classes would provide both diversification and the chance for outsize returns by exploiting opaque parts of the market. By the mid-1990s one fifth of Yale’s endowment portfolio was comprised of hedge funds, which Swensen calls absolute return strategies.
斯文森铺平了道路，首先是哈佛，普林斯顿和斯坦福，然后为其他大学的捐赠。杰克迈耶，聘请在1990年管理哈佛捐赠，成功地在19年的哈佛法管理公司首席执行官担任哈佛管理公司首席执行官的弗伦文化的两位数回报，然后在2005年开始对冲基金。然而，梵文和迈耶对资产的实际管理采取反对意见。耶鲁在经理外面寻求最好的内部管理人员，而哈佛大学在哈佛大陆跑到85％的资产内部，导致一些人配给其管理公司的对冲基金本身。
哈佛和耶鲁的成功吸引了模仿者。在2001年和2002年遭受薪深损失后，较小的学校向他们的常春藤联盟偶像寻求指导他们的投资组合。“校友打电话给我说，”我们将像耶鲁一样，对吧？“回忆起一个中型养老基金的CIO。因此，许多小学都挤满了对冲基金和私募股权，但他们低估了风险。有限的访问顶级投资经理的有限宇宙开始为大型学校创造额外的问题。最佳的对冲基金已关闭，较小的捐赠投资于二线球员。与此同时，最高私募股权基金臃肿，他们的经理投资不足的交易。
“如果你无法进入顶级的十字架或四分位数的经理，它不值得投资替代方案，”乔治城大学的Cio劳伦斯·科莫斯·劳伦斯·戈德（Cio）达到了近10亿美元的捐赠。
The management of so many billions meant hiring top investment talent and ponying up the money to retain it. For years, Meyer had to battle factions of the Harvard community that demanded a reduction of the multimillion-dollar salaries paid to him and his team. Despite the fact that the endowment office had split off as a separate investment management company, some vocal Harvard alumni did not take kindly to seeing Wall Street salaries dispensed in Cambridge. As the endowment approached $23 billion in assets in early 2005, Meyer announced he was stepping down, taking several of his star portfolio managers with him.
大约在同一时间，全国其他投资人员对学校制度施加对他们的限制令人沮丧。管理复合投资组合要求思考 - 和赔偿 - 在学术界盒外，并非所有学校都能够保持焦躁不安的CIO。在他们试图遵循高度多元化的投资模式时，德克萨斯大学北卡罗来纳大学的Mark Yusko等CIO与德克萨斯大学的鲍勃·累累了剑，他们的受托人或皇室的董事会。2004年至2006年间，几个捐赠酋长乘船开始自己的资金。其中：BOLDT;莫顿;yusko;斯坦福大学的团队由迈克尔麦凯科领导;爱丽丝来自弗吉尼亚大学。
哈佛和耶鲁也开始了一个花费的花费，包括越来越多的学校。例如，哈佛在2000年和2008年之间增加了600万平方英尺的新空间，尽管学生人数保持不变。1996年，耶鲁创建了自己的商业房地产开发集团，大学特色，并购买了几十个零售店来改造新避风港市中心。
密歇根大学加入了同行压力，因为这一大十个学校在其足球场中建造奢侈品盒，这一举措将成本为2.26亿美元。纽约大学最近在持续努力中完成了一个新的26层宿舍，共同选择了纽约市房地产越来越多的贡献。
然后灾难袭来了。在耶鲁斯，斯文森只遭受了第二次失去的一年，因为学校捐赠的捐赠者终止了2009年6月30日的12个月下降了24.6％，由其对私募股权和真实资产（特别是石油和天然气）的契约分配驱动。自2008年7月以来，哈佛大国由Cio Mendillo管理的捐赠甚至更差，过去一年下降了27.3％，因为其私募股权投资损失了近三分之一的价值。
“With perfect hindsight we and most other investors would have started this year in a more liquid position and with less exposure to some of the alternative-asset categories that were hardest hit,” Mendillo allowed in Harvard’s fiscal 2009 year-end report.
Both Harvard and Yale have tried to put on a brave face, standing by the long-term success of their strategies. Despite the recent losses, Yale has an 11.8 percent annualized return over the past ten years; Harvard has an 8.9 percent annualized return.
“The three core principles of the endowment model — diversification, trading liquidity for higher long-term returns and active management — didn’t work as expected during the chaotic deleveraging in the second half of 2008, though it still worked better than most other investing strategies,” explains former Stanford University Investment Management Co. CEO McCaffery, who now runs Makena Capital, a $10 billion investment firm in Menlo Park, California.
养老官员了解到在金融危机期间投资的一些非常痛苦的教训 - 其中大部分都是风险。“多年来，学校享受了两位数的回报，因为他们的投资组合本质上是风险的，”芝加哥古根海姆投资顾问首席执行官安德鲁罗森菲尔德说。“也就是说，他们采取了实际股权和降低风险来产生回报。”他补充说，通过投资组合的风险充分考虑的唯一方法是评估可能发生的所有结果，从大量损失到非常高的回报。“风险不是一个数字，”Avers Rosenfield。
在康涅狄格州威尔顿的Commonfund中，为近1,600个非营利组织管理255亿美元，这是William Martin的工作，帮助学校和资产管理人员 - 管理他们的风险。从2008年4月作为首席风险官员加入美国银行的普通公共朋格，表示，问题在于指标和压力测试，即捐赠正在进入危机。他们基于假设正常市场条件的分析方法构建，他解释说，他们的最坏情况无法捕获显着增加波动性，高度相关的资产类别和完全的过度的完美风暴。此外，学校不会全面跨过其所有资产和负债施加压力测试，因此无法评估其投资组合的较低价值和过度的影响。
许多学校已经采取了措施更充分了解风险。Sally Staley, CIO of Case Western Reserve University’s $1.4 billion endowment in Cleveland, notes that the job description of its director of risk management, Anjum Hussain, has expanded substantially since he was hired in 2006. Hussain helped the university negotiate the market turmoil by leading the charge to reduce risk in its portfolio, cutting its exposure to equities to below the 30 percent minimum in its asset allocation plan in October 2008. By November the school had started to reintroduce risk to its portfolio by trading options on the VIX volatility index, which were at record highs.
“风险不仅仅是对徒游防守，”侯赛因解释道。“你也必须冒犯。如果你不承担风险，你就无法赚钱。“
Managing risk also requires understanding extreme events — the fat tails made famous by Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, a recent book on highly unlikely, but still probable, events like the credit crisis. Endowments are coming to the conclusion that they may not need 15 percent returns every year and can instead trade some of the upside for downside protection using futures and options.
最痛苦的课程涉及流动性风险。在过去的一年里，许多捐赠被挤压，因为他们没有留出足够的现金，并对资产课程和私募股权的分配过高 - 这是不容易出售的。“流动性是我们和其他人没有以密切关注的关注，因为我们应该拥有，”Christopher Brown，Cio的Bucknell University，2009年6月30日止了4.93亿美元损失了16.9％。
“我的一生不认为我们将曾经再次掌握过流动性，”剑桥员工和剑桥伙伴总统加入桑迪·乌雷。
许多捐赠可能会向房地产，木材，杠杆收购和风险投资缩减他们的分配。根据华盛顿全国大学商业人员协会的最新数据，这些非高速公路的投资占2008年6月的25.8％。
“捐赠仍然对机会主义，非挑战策略感兴趣，但他们以较小的叮当大小来做，”John Hunt，John Hunt，John Hunt，John Hunt，Ceo Ceo，Ceo的制度业务。大学也可能促进其捐赠和行政人员之间的更多合作和分享信息。一些最大的学校 - 杜克，哈佛，斯坦福和耶鲁 - 已经建立了单独的投资管理公司，远离财务办公室的同行;在其他学校，如威廉姆斯学院，捐赠办事处已将校园迁移到遥远的地区。
Some schools are correcting that separation. Dunn, who was hired from Wilshire Associates earlier this year to manage Wake Forest’s endowment, simultaneously signed on to a position in the university’s administration, where he helps determine schoolwide spending levels and capital project allocations. At smaller schools the finance officer and the investment officer are often one and the same. At large, sprawling campuses like the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the endowment chief, the comptroller, the treasurer and the finance officer hold regular meetings. “The formalized process we have is unique and helps us think about the financial situation in a broader context,” explains Michigan CIO Erik Lundberg.
No matter how hard educational institutions work to build back their decimated portfolios, the hole in the current economy is the biggest risk they face today. Endowment chiefs are cautious in their outlook for the U.S. economy — and thus for the markets. Many are starting to take some profits off the table, given the rally in equities so far this year. Others see the danger in trying to reduce the risk in a portfolio while at the same time staying opportunistic and maintaining a long-term mind-set. Few have an appetite to raise tuition, which has gone up faster than inflation in the past two decades and is already out of reach for many American families. Until the economy improves and creates jobs, schools may have to ratchet back spending even more.
In Cambridge the fate of the Allston science complex is still an open question. Workers are currently preparing the site for a harsh New England winter, filling in the giant 5.5-acre crater and waterproofing the exterior foundation walls. Then, early in the new year, as the cold winds blow off the Charles River, Harvard officials will be sharpening their pencils and hunkering down to determine if their big dream will ever be realized.