The bull run has opened the door for smaller endowments to post eye catching numbers. Yale University's endowment, valued at $44.1 billion in its FY 2025 report and roughly on par with Nepal's economy, returned 9.4% annualized over the 10 years through June 2025. Abilene Christian University, a private Christian school in Abilene, Texas, notched 11.4% over that same span and says it has now crossed the $1 billion threshold. As of June 30, 2026, ACU's endowment was a little over $1 billion.
ACU kept building. By June 30, 2026, its 10-year return rose to 13.6% versus 9.1% for a 70% global stocks and 30% bonds benchmark, and its 20-year average hit 10.9% against a 6.8% bogey. Yale's 2026 figures remain unpublished. Inquiries seeking comment from Yale went unanswered.
ACIMCO, the university controlled firm that runs ACU's portfolio, is led by president and CIO Joe Lee. He credits years of many small, sensible calls that compounded, an equity forward tilt, very long time horizons, and a focus on strong managers with diversification. Being smaller can be a feature, not a bug. As Lee put it, "if you lean into the advantages of a smaller endowment." Big funds often pass on opportunities that are too small for their scale, while "We can look at a $100 million fund and get excited about it and get something material," he said.
Structure is part of the edge. According to Lee, operating through a standalone, university-owned manager allows ACU to extend its horizon and move faster, overseen by its own investment committee and by a board he characterizes as forward thinking and open minded that engages critically when it matters. The emphasis is on avoiding short term scorekeeping. Following interviews with 20 external investment fund managers, Lee concludes that "at the end of the day you are betting on people." In his words, it is a pattern recognition business where skill, integrity, alignment and earning their fees are table stakes.
The portfolio itself is split, with slightly over half allocated to private investments and slightly under half to public markets. For fiscal 2026, returns from private equity and from listed equities were roughly alike for ACU, though it's hard to disentangle because the public bucket includes low-yielding cash. Like most endowments, ACU's funds come with donor restrictions that earmark money for specific purposes, such as aid for chemistry majors or students from underprivileged backgrounds.
Endowment returns are a long-horizon verdict on allocation strategy. Market Briefs covers institutional investing free every weekday.
ACU is not the lone overachiever. Reed College in Portland, Oregon, with an $885 million endowment, posted 7.5%, 12.4%, and 11.6% for the three fiscal years ending June 2025, topping Yale's 1.8%, 5.7%, and 11.1% for those periods. Reed also reports it beat both a classic 60/40 stock-bond portfolio and the Cambridge Associates median college endowment across the last five and 10 years.
Colby College in Waterville, Maine, delivered an 18.2% gain for the year ending June 30, 2026, and a 10.5% 10-year annualized return, net of manager fees. As of that date, the endowment totaled $1.4 billion. One year earlier, Colby's 10-year figure was 8.5% which trailed Yale's 9.4%, and it narrowly beat Harvard's 7.7% and Columbia's 7.8%.
According to Colby, no individual company accounted for over 1% of the prior year's increase. Deborah Shufrin, Colby's associate VP and CIO, pointed to long running ties with premier private fund managers and access to newer emerging top tier funds as key advantages that fit a perpetual, long horizon pool. Donors matter too, and senior vice president Matt Proto said the Dare Northward campaign provided money for downtown Waterville's redevelopment as well as for campus initiatives spanning facilities and academics, scholarships, and sports, with portions of the gifts flowing into the endowment, others seeding new programs and buildings, and still others covering yearly operating needs.
Context is everything with performance tables. Anna Dunn Tabke, founder of Leita Advisory, cautioned that time frames aren't aligned: a number of institutions have already reported up to June 30, 2026, whereas Yale's present 10-year figure is measured only through June 2025. Using a Confluence dataset of 259 small and mid sized endowments and foundations averaging $220 million, she said the top 5% threshold over 10 years was about 8.45% as of June 2025, a bar Yale cleared.
Twelve months on, that cutoff was about 10.5%, and the median hovered around 8.65%, so the average 10-year outcome increased by nearly two percentage points in a single year. Results were also unusually spread out last year, with the best performing 5% near 19.5% and the bottom 5% under 4%, about double the prior year's gap.
Tabke also pointed out that for roughly three years private equity has generated minimal distributions and scant performance, while straightforward, equity-heavy portfolios - particularly large U.S. tech - have led the pack. Some institutions using Yale-like approaches, sometimes through OCIOs, owned SpaceX at the time of its June market debut, and that holding lifted their results. The outsourced CIO approach gained traction roughly ten years back and has sped up notably in the last five years, as hiring a single in-house CIO still entails significant cost plus the need for a staff, external research, and diligence.
Pooling with other institutions can also help smaller schools invest alongside the giants. But smaller endowments typically cannot carry Yale level illiquidity, and schools like Yale and Princeton can lean on centuries of gifts, fundraising and debt in addition to endowment spending and tuition. Many schools release fiscal year results between September and November, and the widely cited NACUBO Commonfund Study of Endowments will publish FY 2026 data in February 2027.
The real punch line is not that size has stopped mattering. It is that your mix, your pace and your measurement window can swing multi year results a lot. In this cycle, more public equity and fewer hard to sell assets helped several smaller funds, and a one off like SpaceX's listing lifted a few others.
If you are benchmarking performance, check what period is being measured, how much sits in private versus public assets and how much illiquidity the portfolio can carry. Those are the levers behind the gap you are seeing, and they are the same ones that shape any long term portfolio.
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