In the latest example of a strong year for higher education endowment returns, Brown University reported a 19.6% return for fiscal 2026—the one-year period that ended on June 30. The value of the assets managed by the institution rose to $9.5 billion at the end of June, up from $8 billion at the end of the prior fiscal year.
“The stewardship of Brown’s endowment is rooted in a set of unchanging tenets: a team of dedicated professional investors committed to Brown’s mission, long-term partnerships with investment managers of exceptional ability and high character, and governance that provides both oversight and guidance,” Brown CIO Jane Dietze said in a statement. “A commitment to those principles has enabled the Brown endowment to support financial aid, groundbreaking research and other university priorities at a historic rate.”
Over the past three, five, 10 and 20 years, the endowment has returned an annualized 14.2%, 7.8%, 13.6% and 9.7%, respectively. In the university’s fiscal 2025 endowment report, the endowment reported allocating 44% of its assets to private equity, 22% to absolute return strategies, 10% to both public equity and real assets, 8% to credit strategies, and 4% to cash and receivables.
Like many university endowments, Brown has seen high double-digit returns. Many peer institutions saw strong returns from their exposure to SpaceX, as well as to the artificial intelligence theme through their venture capital managers. The University of North Carolina Management Co., for example, reported a 37.8% return during the fiscal year, driven by a more than 15-year-old investment in SpaceX.
That exposure, though, has driven a divergence in returns between those with significant exposure to SpaceX and AI and those with more minimal investments in those areas. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, reported a 10.3% return for the fiscal year. While few would typically balk at a double-digit return for any fiscal year, that figure trails the performance of some peer institutions by a wide margin.
This divergence in performance has also spread to public pension funds. In August, MassPRIM CIO Michael Trotsky, in an investment committee meeting, noted that the state’s pension fund and many others had missed out on SpaceX and other AI names, which he attributed to not having access to the best venture managers.
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