Three Years After Outsourcing, Haverford College’s Endowment Shows Healthy Growth

As a small liberal arts college, Haverford relies heavily on its endowment for funding. About a quarter of the college’s budget (~$30 million) is paid for by endowment draws.

In 2022, Haverford transitioned from an in-house investment office to external endowment management by Investure, a Virginia-based investment firm. Since its inception in 2003, Investure has acquired a growing list of clients, including colleges like Middlebury, Bates, and Macalester, as well as nonprofit foundations such as the National Academy of Sciences, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Together, these clients add up to a total of roughly $19 billion in assets under management, of which Haverford’s endowment now constitutes $750 million.

The choice to transition comes after a longtime recovery period following the devastation caused by the Great Recession in 2008. Following a peak endowment value of approximately $540 million in 2007 and modest losses in 2008, Haverford suffered net losses of $183 million in 2009, settling at a value of approximately $335 million at the end of fiscal year 2009. This represented a roughly 35% loss, compared to a national average of 19% across colleges and universities. It would take Haverford until 2021 to surpass its 2007 peak: a 14 year effort.

Along with this change in management has come a shift in investment distribution. Since 2020, the endowment has shifted strongly away from international equity funds and to a lesser extent domestic equity funds, while increasing the concentration of alternative investment classes like hedge funds, private equity and venture capital. In their FY25 endowment letter, the Investment Committee and Investure stated that “The endowment is intentionally more diversified and constructed to protect in large market downturns,” while observing that “public markets have been driven by a few mega-cap, growth-oriented tech stocks that are highly concentrated in public market indices.” This caution about exposure to a volatile stock market can be observed in a gradual shift away from public equities. While still making up a very significant 39.6% of the portfolio (compared to private equity at 16.7%, hedge funds at 15.5%, and venture capital at 7%), public equity concentration has decreased since it made up 46.5% of the portfolio in Investure’s first year of management.

Investure acknowledges that investment changes in the pursuit of prudence and stability have the drawback of slowing endowment returns, especially during a stock market boom like we’ve seen in the past three years. “A key trade-off of downside protection is that the portfolio may lag in fast-rising “up” equity markets like fiscal year 2025.” However, the endowment has still shown strong returns net of fees and expenses since Investure has taken over: it returned 8.1% in FY23, 12.1% in FY24, and 10.3% in FY25. Despite these strong returns however, and the overall endowment value increasing from $619 million at the beginning of FY23 to $751 million at the end of FY25, endowment payouts for operations have stalled at $30 million during this period. This may signal a focus on increasing the endowment in the long run over current spending, possibly towards a goal of a $1 billion market value, which has frequently been referenced as a goal within the Haverford 2030 project.