Harvard and Stanford Nearly Make Up Financial Crisis Losses
Harvard and Stanford, two of the nation’s richest universities, say that endowment returns for fiscal 2011 brought them to within striking distance of where they stood before the financial crisis lopped off billions of investment value. The Harvard Management Company, which manages the university’s endowment, reported a gain of 21.4 percent – or $4.4 billion – in fiscal 2011, which ended on June 30. That gain increased the size of Harvard’s endowment to $32 billion. The gain, on top of fiscal 2010’s return of 11 percent, marks a strong reversal for the giant endowment, which plummeted 27 percent – or $11 billion – in fiscal 2009, from a pre-crisis peak of $36.9 billion in fiscal 2008. That leaves Harvard just $4.9 billion shy of where it was before the financial crisis.
