Updated: Sunday, July 6, 2008 at 1:37pm
At a bash three years ago in honor of David Swensen’s 20th year at the helm of the Yale endowment, a curious bar chart showed the giving of several of Yale’s most generous donors. There were the Harknesses, memorialized on Yale’s most popular classroom building, at $128 million. The Sterlings, of library fame, came in at $151 million, topped by the Beineckes at $263...
Harvard University tapped a member of Yale’s Investment Committee on Thursday to take the helm of its world-leading $34.9 billion endowment. Jane Mendillo ’80 SOM ’84, the chief investment officer at Wellesley College, will become the new president and chief executive officer of the Harvard Management Company effective July 1, the HMC’s board of directors...
Yale administrators found themselves asking for a dean’s excuse this week. But instead of needing an extension for a class, the University needed one from the Senate Finance Committee. More than a month after the committee asked Yale and 135 other top universities to disclose details about how they spend their endowment riches, University officials have not quite...
University President Richard Levin has garnered headlines in recent years for reaching out to China. Now, according to news reports, Yale will own a part of it — or at least part of its state-owned railroad. The University will reportedly invest $50 million in the China Railway Construction Corp. as part of the company’s $5.4 billion initial public offering, a...
In the past two months, Yale and Harvard have announced the largest increases in undergraduate financial aid in the respective schools’ histories. But for the Senate Finance Committee, that may not be enough. As part of its probe into whether universities are generous enough in spending their endowment riches to provide financial aid and head off rising tuition, the...
Around the country yesterday, university financial wizards like Chief Investment Officer David Swensen got good news and bad news. Early in the day, they received word that, according to an influential benchmark, university endowments last year posted their largest gains in recent memory. Then came something less encouraging: By the end of the day, the Dow Jones...
Five weeks ago, right next to stories about the CIA’s destruction of interrogation tapes, a Supreme Court ruling about sentencing guidelines and Vladimir Putin’s anointment of a hand-picked successor, the front page of The New York Times declared, “Harvard to Aid Students High in Middle Class.” The day before, the university had stunned the higher education world...
Yale may seem to be a magnet for media attention, but seducing that media is not easy. In the cases of Yale’s endowment announcement last week and for its financial aid announcement on Monday, the University did not merely send out a news release to reporters. Yale President Richard Levin also hit the road to stump for coverage from some of America’s largest...
The thousands of Yale students who receive financial assistance had plenty to cheer about Monday when the University announced that its tuition costs could drop by over 50 percent next year. But the many students who pay full freight to attend Yale got some good news, too. The cost of attending Yale for those students will be $46,000 — the lowest increase in recent...
University officials have not disclosed how much the Yale financial-aid budget will increase as the result of a new financial-aid initiative to be unveiled early this week. But it is now clear how the University will pay for it: by tapping into Yale’s endowment riches. In an aggressive change of course, the University announced last week it would increase the amount of...
Posted Monday 7:30 p.m. In an aggressive change of course, Yale will increase the amount of money it spends from its endowment by nearly 40 percent next year in part to provide more financial aid to students and to launch new research on the West Campus, University President Richard Levin announced Monday. The move comes after months of pressure from Congress and...
The University endowment returned a staggering 28.0 percent last fiscal year, the strongest performance of any large college endowment fund so far this year. The returns boost the endowment to $22.5 billion from last fall’s total of $18 billion, according to a University press release, keeping it the second-largest university fund in the country. But some investing...
