Endowment Declines 27% in 2008
Last February, the Cornell University endowment was valued at $5.4B; now the endowment has shrunk by 27% from its June ‘08 highs to just $4.5B according to the Cornell Daily Sun. There’s still no official quarterly financial report on the Investment Office’s endowment page, so we take these figures with a grain of salt.
The decline follows a broad sell-off in equity markets, and tracks well with similar declines at Harvard (25%), Yale (25%), and Columbia (22%). Dartmouth appears to have missed the bullet, posting a market-beating 6% loss. CU President Skorton, in an interview with Bloomberg, outlines cost-cutting measures designed to help Cornell through this financial crisis:
We’re throttling back our expenditures. We’re going to need a 10 percent correction in our budget in the next three to five years.
This does not include potential future losses from “hard to value” assets in “real estate and private equity” which account for a third of the fund. See also Meta Ezra and the Cornell alumni magazine for more endowment reporting.
