Stanford University’s endowment, the world’s third largest, grew 11.3 percent in the most recent fiscal year, officials said this week.
The university did not provide the endowment’s total value at the end of the 2018 fiscal year, which ended June 30, but said that it was $26.5 billion at the end of August.
Stanford’s announcement followed similar reports by the two universities with larger endowments: Harvard, the world’s biggest, and Yale.
Harvard said its endowment grew 10 percent in the 2018 fiscal year, to $39.2 billion. Yale said its endowment climbed 12.3 percent, to $29.4 billion.
The returns for all three universities’ returns exceeded the 8.4 percent gain that a typical 60-40 portfolio of Standard & Poor’s 500 stock and aggregate bond index equities would have delivered over the same period.
The results also outpaced the 8.3 percent median return achieved by a broad universe of United States colleges and universities, according to preliminary data from the investment firm Cambridge Associates.
But the gains trailed those made by the endowments at several other large universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (13.2 percent) and the University of Pennsylvania (12.9 percent).
Stanford’s endowment is led by Robert F. Wallace, who joined the university as its chief investment officer in 2015 after running Alta Advisors, a private investment firm based in London. Since taking the job, he has been revamping the endowment’s staff and its approach to investing.
In a news release, Mr. Wallace said Stanford’s results had been buoyed by the strong performance of the university’s private equity investments.
But he noted that the results for Stanford’s illiquid assets, including private equity, had “trailed our expectations” and that the university’s efforts to “reposition the illiquid asset classes are still in early stages and will require more time to complete.”
Mr. Wallace’s restructuring of Stanford’s investment strategy and staff in some ways resembles the moves being made by Harvard’s investment chief, N.P. Narvekar, who took the reins there in 2016.
The turnover atop Stanford endowment’s has not been as extreme as what Harvard, which shuffled through several investment chiefs before hiring Mr. Narvekar, has experienced in recent years. Still, two investment chiefs, John Powers and Michael McCaffery, have come and gone at Stanford since 2000.
Mr. Wallace is one of several university investment chiefs in the country who trained at Yale under David F. Swensen, the longtime leader of the university’s endowment. Bowdoin College, whose chief investment officer, Paula Volent, is also a protégé of Mr. Swensen’s, this week reported that its endowment had grown 15.7 percent, to $1.63 billion, in the 2018 fiscal year.
