US: Slight rebound for endowments

13 December 2009

Early indications from a survey released last week suggest that after a brutal 2008, college endowments began to rebound in the first part of this year, writes Doug Lederman for Inside Higher Ed. That's one of the apparent findings from a preliminary version of a survey of institutional endowments conducted by the National Association of College and University Business Officers and Commonfund.

The two organisations' formal survey won't be released until January, but given the widespread curiosity/paranoia about colleges' economic situations, they opted to issue an early version based on 504 of a total of more than 800 expected institutional responses. The preliminary survey finds that the 504 funds lost about 19% of their value in the 2009 fiscal year. But an interim study the groups released in January based on the first five months of the fiscal year (July-November 2008) revealed a 22.3% drop at that point. So the new survey suggests that the endowments benefited from a slight upturn in the months between November 2008 and the fiscal year's end in June.
Full report on the Inside Higher Ed site

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