Dartmouth Endowment Feeling A Similar Pain As Harvard And Yale

Like the Harvard and Yale endowments, the endowment at Dartmouth is feeling the pain of the slowing economy and falling market, losing 18 percent, or to $3 billion over the last year (see Bloomberg article). The losses are resulting in spending cuts of 8.6 percent. Of interest is that like its bigger Ivy League members, Dartmouth had only about 12 percent of its assets in US stocks. Like Harvard and Yale, it also had a number of illiquid assets (such as private equity) whose values have not been updated. To its credit, trustees at the college projected early last year that the US economy was entering a recession and subsequently lowered its exposure to corporate bonds and MBS, and began purchasing additional TIPS. Eighteen percent is painful, but foresight and diversification seem to have helped to ease the pain at Dartmouth.