Yale received $231 million in gifts to its endowment in fiscal 2024.
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Yale University reported a 5.7% return on its endowment in fiscal year 2024, which ended June 30. That $2.3 billion investment gain, in addition to $231 million in endowment gifts, brought the total value of the fund to $41.4 billion, up from $40.7 billion at the end of fiscal 2023.
The investment growth is an improvement over the last two years, when Yale reported a 1.8% and 0.8% return, respectively, but it trails the results of six of its Ivy League peers—Columbia University and Brown University both notched returns over 11%, while Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, Cornell University reported returns over 7%. Princeton’s $34 billion fund generated the lowest return of the Ivies, 3.9%, in fiscal 2024.
Like many colleges and universities, Yale’s endowment is heavily invested in private equity, venture capital and real estate, and failed to capture the stellar public market performance in fiscal 2024. In the year ending June 30, the S&P 500 returned 22.7%. (Yale’s former chief investment officer David F. Swensen was famous for “The Yale Model,” an approach to endowment investing that avoids commodities and fixed income assets in favor of alternative investments like hedge funds and private equity).
“Given our significant allocation to private assets, we expect to lag during periods of strong public market performance, particularly when exit markets for private assets are depressed,” Matt Mendelsohn, Yale’s chief investment officer, said in a press release. “As always, we remain focused on achieving investment success over the long term, knowing that doing so is likely to bring stretches of short-term underperformance.”
Over the past 10 years, Yale’s endowment has averaged a 9.5% return—boosted by a whopping 40.2% return in fiscal 2021. The university has spent $14.3 billion from its endowment over that decade—in fiscal 2024, endowment distributions totaled $2 billion. Endowment earnings are the largest source of revenue for the university in New Haven, Connecticut, accounting for about a third of its annual operating budget.
