Harvard runs one of the biggest pools of money in higher ed. The man in charge of that pool is one of the best paid people on campus. But not the top earner. That title went to three retiring business professors.
N.P. "Narv" Narvekar pulled in $6.21 million in pay and bonus for 2024. With deferred pay added in, the total comes to $6.38 million.
That's almost the same as what he made the past two years. About $1 million was base pay. The rest was tied to how the fund did.
His chief investment officer Richard Slocum made $4.98 million. Treasurer Sanjeev Daga came in near $5 million. The team is paid like a top hedge fund. That's because, in plain terms, they are one.
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The $53.2 billion fund posted a 9.6% return in fiscal 2024. That's a clear step up from the rough years right before. And it beat Yale, which posted 5.7% and has often led the Ivy pack on returns.
Harvard's fund is the largest in higher ed. It dwarfs the funds at MIT, Princeton, and Stanford. Per student, it works out to more than $2 million each. That's the kind of pool that shapes how the school runs.
Narvekar gave the credit to his stock and hedge fund picks. In plain terms? He says the gains came from picking the right outside money managers. Not from a hot market.
Harvard's pay panel held Narvekar's check almost flat for the third year in a row. Pay at the fund is set on a multi-year cycle. So one strong year does not push the number up much. The panel also cut a small piece of his pay back in fiscal 2022 after a weak year. That drag is still working through.
Narvekar took the top job at Harvard's fund in late 2016. He cut the in-house team in half. He shifted more cash to outside money managers. That move took years to pay off. Critics inside Harvard pushed back hard on his plan. Now the returns are showing up. The pay panel is sticking with the system that helped get them there.
Harvard's top-paid staff in 2024 weren't the school's president or its football coach. They were three female business profs, two of whom study gender at work. Each cleared near $1.9 million on the way out the door. Each took a lump-sum buyout from the Harvard Business School. The fund chief came in fourth.
The buyouts are part of a wider push at Harvard Business School to refresh the faculty. The school has been offering one-time payouts to senior staff who agree to retire by a set date. The result, in 2024, was a quirky pay list where the top names are people walking out the door, not running things. The endowment chief - who controls billions in assets - made less than the gender experts taking retirement.
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