The big/fancy universities and their endowments get a lot of investing attention.

Two major reasons:

1. they have access and connections (and attract the best of the best via extremely high-paid staff) that you and I don't.
2. they follow the YALE MODEL from the 1980s by David Swensen: underweight bonds and harvest illiquidity, basically.

Still, there are some differences.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that its massive endowment, managed by executives who earn more than the university’s president, earned 10.3% during its fiscal year ended in June. That’s less than half of what an S&P 500 index fund earned.

Not that impressive. Weird that the MIT team hadn't done better. Problem? Didn't have SpaceX pre-IPO...

MIT’s results are more surprising during a tech boom that it might seem uniquely equipped to harness. Harvard and Stanford’s endowments, which held big stakes) in SpaceX acquired before its IPO, jumped 27.1% and 31.7%, respectively. The University of North Carolina, which had more than a tenth of its endowment in that stock, did even better.

Great Musk-ivite payoff to the "live a little" crowd (#1600985)

As uplifting as one-year moonshots are, big college endowments offer tuition-free lessons these days about how not to invest. Special access to mostly so-so but costly private equity, hedge and venture-capital funds has seen their returns lag what mom and pop investors could have made over the past decade.

Swansen "could take a very long view, and illiquid investments were cheaper back then."

NOW?

Not so much. Private credit sumbling... everybody wants a piece of the pre-IPO AI hassle. The Robinhoods of the world, whose Venture Fund with early access in some of these AIs, "sports a 3.1% expense ratio, 100 times the cost of an S&P 500 index fund..." Then again, it's in their interest to open that bit up to their business... and the Trump Admin have voiced special accounts or bitcoin or private markets in e.g., 401(k)s. These are weird times.

[Investing veteran Richard] Ennis writes that endowment managers "mostly operate as if nothing has changed" since Swensen's heyday. Allocating 60% to alternatives costs them about 3% annually, or about what Robinhood charges, according to his math.

archive broken, partial look via SMRY https://smry.ai/https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/elite-colleges-can-give-you-an-investing-lesson-699dc432... full article via Den trickery