Data gleaned from an interesting interactive chart at CHE (behind a paywall) shows that from the end of 2007 (just before the financial crisis) to the end of 2016, many universities with huge endowments did not get richer in inflation-adjusted dollars. Harvard, for example, went from an endowment of over forty billion to one less than thirty-five billion dollars (again, adjusted for inflation)--a loss of 14% over the ten-year period! Yale lost not quite a billion dollars on its endowment during this period, representing about a 3% decline.
Several schools were basically flat during this ten-year period, including my own (Chicago), despite running a capital campaign during this time. Stanford and Princeton posted modest gains, but the really big winners included the University of Texas and Texas A&M University Sytems, which increased their endowments by roughly a third to, respectively, over 24 billion dollars and over 10 billion dollars--but per student, given the huge size of these systems, the value is much less than at the rich private schools. Among the latter, the big winners were the University of Pennsylvania, which grew its endowment by 39% (!) during this time, to nearly 11 billion dollars, and Northwestern University, which increased its endowment 27%, to just under 10 billion dollars.
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