We're The Worst At Something

The popular finance blog 24/7 Wall St. threw a couple stones at Fair Harvard last night, calling our endowment "by a wide margin the worst managed endowment." Ouch.

The National Association of College and University Business Officers recently released an analysis legitimizing common knowledge about the suckiness of our endowment, but 24/7 Wall St. took it a step further, calling us the worst at managing money (based on both percent and absolute dollar loss) among 842 institutions with endowments greater than $1 billion.

The article noted that this is “ironic” because Harvard boasted to the alumni and media about the "brilliance" of those who managed the endowment. Because Harvard people are supposed to be like, all smart or whatever, you know?

Now, we’d all just like to call 24/7 Wall St. a big bully. The kind of institution that swaggers onto the university playground, walks up to bright-eyed and defenseless Harvard, pokes him in the chest, and calls him “Worst Managed Endowment” just to see him cry. But does the bully have a point? Or is it simplistic to assume that having the largest loss automatically means our endowment is the "worst managed"?

Maybe no university minds being at the top of a list, even if the statistics that accompany the top spot are a $10.9 billion-dollar loss and -29.8 percent change in endowment market value. And sure, we’re accustomed to Yale, Stanford, and Princeton being behind us...but then again, endowment mismanagement is one area we don't really want to dominate.