Yale University said on Friday that its endowment, which has sizable assets in real estate, had an investment gain of 8.9 percent last year, an underwhelming performance in a year when many big endowments are reporting gains of 9 percent to 14 percent.
The current environment is particularly difficult though James Rothenberg, chairman of Harvard Management's board, said on Thursday that the endowment was up since the start of fiscal 2008.
Columbia University said on Wednesday that its endowment performed far better than some other large schools' and better than the major stock market indexes in the latest year, posting a 17.3 percent return on its investments.
The company said in court papers that it was evaluating the restrictions on the endowment fund and that it would not withdraw money from it without court permission.
The figures follow the revelation on Monday that estates, endowments, investments and other assets held by Oxford and Cambridge are collectively worth almost £21bn.
The move was based on the assumption that the endowment would keep growing.
The restitutionary measures aroused anti-Catholic feeling among Protestants in neighbouring Ontario, where in 1889 a motion was introduced into the House of Commons urging the Dominion government to disallow the measure on the grounds that its endowment of the Society of Jesus was a threat to civil and religious liberties.
That endowment is passed on to their children.
Last weekend at a meeting of the Board of Trustees, Andrew Golden, the president of Princeton University Investment Company PRINCOO), reported that the return on the endowment during the 2008-9 academic year was -23.7 percent.
Alex Jones, who co-authored "The Trust," a history of the Times, weighed in this week with his own variation on the endowment theme, suggesting that philanthropists should fund an hour of news programming on PBS.
