Dartmouth 14.6, Yale 11.3 – But Not Exactly

Dartmouth's football team beat Yale, 28-27. Dartmouth's endowment has won more convincingly. For the fiscal year ending last June, Dartmouth achieved an investment return of 14.6%. Yale lagged at 11.3%.

In reality, there's less to all those numbers than meets the eye. Yale's one-point football loss resulted from an erroneous out-of-bounds

 ruling on an end-zone catch that video showed to have been a touchdown. As for the endowment returns, their precision is partly the result of accounting fiction, as Yale School of Management's Roger Ibbotson has pointed out:

"When you have private equity and venture capital assets that are not priced every day, it is difficult to know exactly what the real performance is. I don’t really like ranking the endowments annually because there’s such a significant measurement error."

Long term, the investment performance of Yale's endowment remains remarkable: an average of 12.1% per annum over the last 20 years.  The endowment's domestic equities returned 12.2%,  trouncing the benchmark return of 7.5%. Makes you wonder why David Swensen allocates only 4% of Yale's endowment to shares in U.S. companies.