Endowments Well endowed

Many corporate pension funds have had a miserable time of late. So they must be looking enviously at the investment returns achieved by the likes of Stanford University, whose endowment fund (including alumni donations) rose 23% last year. However, pension funds are not in a position to emulate the recent success of US university endowments. Stanford’s exceptional returns came mainly from its stake in Google, mostly acquired through licensing technology to the search engine founders, who are al...