Outpacing recent performance by its peer institutions, Yale's endowment generated a 22.9 percent return last year, the university's investment office said Monday.
Now valued at more than $18 billion, Yale's endowment is second in size only to Harvard's, which grew to $29.2 billion in the 2005-06 fiscal year ending June 30, according to numbers released by the Harvard Management Company last week.
The Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO), which manages the University's endowment, is expected to release its 2005-06 numbers after its board of directors meets on Oct. 25, University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt '96 said Wednesday.
The impressive performance of Yale's endowment surprised administrators there, who had predicted that investment returns would slow this year.
"Certainly, at the beginning of the year we would not have forecasted such an outstanding result," Yale president Richard Levin told The Yale Daily News. "If we look at the budget projections five to 10 years away, we show substantial surpluses based on the actual performances of the last few years."
Yale's investment returns rose 0.6 percentage points this year to 22.9 percent. At Harvard, however, returns slowed to 16.7 percent from 19.2 percent last year. Princeton reported investment returns of 17 percent last year.
The University's endowment was the nation's fourth-largest private endowment in 2004-05, totaling $11.2 billion, just behind Harvard, Yale and Stanford. PRINCO recruiting advertisements printed in The Daily Princetonian in recent weeks, however, have stated that the endowment is now valued at $13 billion.
Over the past 10 years, Yale's endowment has grown by $13.1 billion from $4.9 billion in 1996.
PRINCO manages the endowment with a philosophy focused on sustained and consistent returns, company president Andrew Golden told the 'Prince' last year.
"Our program is built to have resilience," he said. "We're focused on the long term. We want to see what happens over the next 50 years."
Though the University's endowment is smaller in size than Harvard's and Yale's, it is the largest per student in the Ivy League and the second largest among the nation's undergraduate institutions, according to data from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, which has fewer than 300 students and an endowment of nearly $500 million, ranks first.
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