Published On Tuesday, December 02, 2008 10:01 PM
By CLIFFORD M MARKS and JUNE Q. WU Crimson Staff Writers
Harvard’s endowment—the largest in higher education—fell 22 percent in four months from its June 30 value of $36.9 billion, marking the endowment’s largest decline in modern history, University officials announced yesterday. The precipitous drop will require Harvard’s faculties to take a “hard look at hiring, staffing levels, and compensation,” wrote University President Drew G. Faust and Executive Vice President Edward C. Forst ’82 in a letter informing the deans of Harvard’s losses. The decline, which amounts to more than $8 billion, is larger than the endowments of all but four other universities—Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT. In the same period, the S&P 500 fell 24.6 percent. The index has fallen an additional 12.4 percent since then....
Reprinted courtesy of Barron's, December 2, 1996 (click here)
Some students enter the hallowed halls of Harvard University looking for the meaning of life, while others merely want an Ivy League sheepskin to help them secure their first job. When Barron's recently visited Harvard, however, we were searching for something far more elusive: an investment strategy that will beat the market while taking few risks....
