Global equities spurred a 12.4% return in fiscal 2025 for Columbia University’s endowment, raising its asset value to $15.9 billion as of the end of June. The Columbia University Investment Management Co., which manages the endowment’s investments, also reported trailing five- and 10-year returns of 9.9% and 7.8%, respectively.
“Columbia’s performance in fiscal year 2025 reflects the positive performance of global equity markets, and a portfolio of talented public markets managers who have skillfully invested in these strong markets and created alpha to enhance returns,” Columbia Investment Management Co. President and CEO Kim Lew said in a statement.
Lew also said she “saw a significant improvement versus the last few years” among Columbia’s private investments.
“Our strong belief in the culture of innovation in the U.S., coupled with the company-building expertise resident in many private equity firms, strengthens our commitment to investing in private markets,” Lew said. However, she added that despite the improved performance, the investments still lag behind public equities.
While the endowment’s portfolio has been strong—it returned 11.5% in 2024—the university’s finances “experienced a major destabilizing event,” in March when hundreds of federal grants were terminated, according to Anne Sullivan, the university’s executive vice president for finance, in a letter to the Columbia community,
The university’s fiscal 2025 financial statements showed net assets of $20.5 billion, up 3.7% from fiscal 2024. The growth came from operating results, as well as a net contribution from non-operating activities, which include the endowment’s return.
Sullivan said that although the university received $1.3 billion in government grant revenue during the fiscal year, “the face of our financial results does not adequately capture the level of strain experienced by the research enterprise in the third and fourth quarters.”
Sullivan said that more than 350 grants were terminated, and federal reimbursements were halted for most of Columbia’s active, non-terminated grants. However, she added that the university agreed to a deal with the federal government in July that reinstated 260 of the grants.
Columbia tapped certain unrestricted endowment funds “on a modest scale” for the Research Stabilization Fund it used to provide internal grants in June and September to 500 projects that had lost federal funding.
“These funds are vital to ensure continuity of research programs and stability of our teams within the research enterprise, and to provide seed funding for researchers to pivot and ultimately diversify their funding sources,” Sullivan wrote, noting that some other “endowment-dependent activities” within the university were scaled back to enable use of the funds of the RSF. “Because tapping [the] endowment for one-time purposes erodes our future capacity to provide support for programs … utilizing endowment assets in this way, beyond our annual distribution, is a rare and multi-faceted decision which we do not make lightly.”
The endowment contributes approximately 12% of Columbia’s annual budget, according to the university’s annual financial overview.
Related Stories:
Columbia Endowment Achieves 11.5% Return in Fiscal 2024
Columbia Endowment Names Kim Lew CEO
Hamilton College Names Columbia’s Lauren Jacobson CIO
Tags: Columbia University, Columbia University Investment Management Company, Endowments, Ivy League