Endowment revenue accounted for two-thirds of Princeton University’s net operating revenue in fiscal year 2024.
Getty Images
Princeton University’s endowment ended the fiscal year 2024, which ends June 30, with a better-than-average return on investment of 3.9%, at $34.1 billion, the university reported Thursday. The positive return came after two years of investment losses, but Princeton’s endowment’s average return over the past 10 years was 9.2% and over the past 20 years it was 9.9%. The value of donations (after new donations and distributions) remained unchanged starting in FY2023. Harvard University ended the year with an endowment of $53.2 billion, but Princeton University is even richer when calculated on a per-student endowment basis.
Princeton’s year-over-year returns lag behind those of six other elite Ivy League schools, ranging from a low of 7.1% at the University of Pennsylvania to a high of 11.5% at Columbia University. is. Yale has not yet released information about its endowment for fiscal year 2024. Like other universities, Princeton’s endowment performance has lagged behind the S&P 500 index, which returned 22.7% in the year ending June 30. Fiscal year 2024 was the last year that Princeton University’s endowment was managed by Andrew Golden, who retired on June 30 after serving as president of Princeton University Investment Corporation since 1995. He was replaced by Vince Tuohei, a former investment director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Investment management company.
Distributions from Princeton’s endowment total $1.7 billion and account for approximately two-thirds of the school’s net operating revenues. This proportion has steadily increased, and in 1997, endowment distributions accounted for only one-third of net operating income. Seventy percent of the funds raised from the endowment in 2024 were used to support Princeton University’s financial aid budget. Princeton University, like other Ivy League schools, offers generous grant aid. Students with household incomes up to $100,000 will not pay any costs to attend the school. Additionally, students with household incomes up to $300,000 are eligible for some grant aid.
Protests rocked Princeton’s campus last spring, as did college campuses across the country, but the university has not received the same national scrutiny for its response as Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, or MIT. Ta. It is unclear whether student demonstrations affected Princeton University’s fundraising efforts in the same way as Harvard and Columbia Universities.
