The Ivy Leagues continue to deliver double-digit performance this year, with Harvard and Brown universities posting their highest returns in five years and boosting their endowments to record highs.
Harvard generated a return of roughly 27 percent for the fiscal year ending in June, boosting its endowment to $68 billion. Meanwhile, Brown’s endowment generated a 19.6 percent investment return for the fiscal year ending in June, bringing its value up to $9.5 billion. These returns are in line with other large universities, many of whom also had early holdings in SpaceX.
In his annual letter to investors and the Harvard community, Harvard Management Co. CEO N.P. “Narv” Narvekar attributed performance primarily to venture capital, public equities, and hedge funds. Returns were also shaped by the portfolio’s composition, as the management company deliberately grew private equity to be the largest of the portfolio, at 46 percent.
While Narvekar writes that while he is “reassured to see that strength reflected in this fiscal year’s results across the portfolio,” HMC still plans to “proceed with caution.”
“Harvard continues to navigate significant challenges, this year’s investment performance will bolster the endowment’s capacity to support the university in the years ahead,” he said before cautioning: “Outsized returns can sometimes portend subdued, or even negative, returns in the near term.”
New analysis from Markov Processes International attributes more than 10 percentage points of Harvard’s FY26 result to incremental SpaceX exposure, consistent with MPI’s earlier hypothesis that a substantial position could lift an otherwise strong year toward 30 percent. MPI’s model detected little incremental SpaceX exposure for Brown and lost the signal seen in earlier analysis of MIT’s portfolio.
Meanwhile, documents from Brown’s investment office show that emerging markets and U.S. small caps drove returns, with holdings in Bitcoin dragging down the portfolio. Analysis by MPI suggests that venture capital and public equities contributed “almost equally” to Brown’s return, with digital assets pulling returns down slightly, though less so than MIT’s.
With a 10-year annualized return of 13.6 percent, Brown leads its peers for long-term performance, followed by Stanford, at 12.5 percent; Penn, 12.0 percent; MIT, 11.7 percent; and Harvard, 11.1 percent.
Starting this fiscal year, both universities will pay a higher excess tax rate on investment gains — 4 percent for Brown, 8 percent for Harvard — as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Congress 2025. Amid federal pressure and grant withdrawals, university endowments have increased spending as alumni donations have fallen off, with the annual spending rate for all colleges and universities reaching 4.9 percent in FY25.
