Felix Salmon on the problems with university endowments
Felix Salmon reviews the new Tellus Institute report “Educational Endowments and the Financial Crisis,” authored principally by Joshua Humphreys, senior associate and director of the Institute’s Center for Social Philanthropy.
An excerpt from Salmon:
“But even if they want to continue to chase absolute returns, it’s clear that the endowment model massively overestimated their appetite for illiquid assets. The idea was that because they’re investing with the longest conceivable time horizon, they can put a lot of their money into highly illiquid investments. But then they got bit by the fact that their universities were naturally likely to fall back on endowment monies at precisely the point at which illiquid markets seize up completely. Endowments should be countercyclical buffers, when it comes to universtity finances, not pro-cyclical exacerbators of financial crises.
“And they should also be a lot more transparent than they are. Writes Humphreys:
When reported, school-specific data are nonstandardized, inconsistent, incomplete and fragmentary, and scattered across municipal, state, SEC and IRS filings, incommensurable annual reports, and costly proprietary financial databases unavailable to the general public.
“There’s no excuse for this. Let’s force endowments to standardize their public reports, and show, rather than tell, just what their highly-paid employees are doing to deserve all their millions of dollars in remuneration. And let’s force them, too, to spend a lot more time concentrating on liquidity risk management, and to cast a skeptical eye on the amount of leverage that these institutions really need.”
Read Salmon’s full story here and the Tellus report here.
