Endowment Plunge Spells Long-Term Pain for Once-Flush Colleges

Harvard, Yale, and other elite colleges face years of fiscal austerity as a result of the steep drop in the value of their endowments, reports Bloomberg.

While stocks have regained some ground in recent months, the universities’ endowments are weighed down by assets that haven’t recovered as quickly and are harder to sell, such as private equity, real estate, and commodities holdings. Yale and Princeton project no endowment growth this fiscal year, and Stanford estimates its fund may take more than 15 years to return to its $17.2 billion peak of August.