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Is the outsourcing somewhat recent? I've been reading through the actual text in the Piketty book and he discusses the relative advantages of large university e

Is the outsourcing somewhat recent? I've been reading through the actual text in the Piketty book and he discusses the relative advantages of large university endowments vs smaller ones. He has a data table in it for 1980-2010 where the returns seem pretty reasonable (but much higher for larger account balances of Harvard-Yale-Princeton). http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/pdf/T12.2.pdf http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/pdf/T12.2.pdf People can argue about his book's overall points, but few can argue that he's accumulated a lot of interesting data. I've been trying to reconcile that data with the Buffet view of complex hedge funds not beating straight index funds for gain... and by some other data Buffet is correct.. but the risk profiles may differ (Though it often feels like "risk" is the financial industry equivalent of engineering fudge factors).

inthewoods 11y ago
That's a great question - when I was in the industry (back in 2005-2006) Harvard had already outsourced a large portion after their managers left. In many cases, the managers started up their own funds and then Harvard immediately placed money into them. I think the answer may be that Harvard (and others) continue to see decent returns - the question is at what cost relative to managing it internally.