Following new research from the University of Illinois arguing that its $3.3 billion endowment could have been nearly $800 million larger had its investments kept pace with benchmark returns, leaders of the independent University of Illinois Foundation that runs the portfolio are pushing back, contending that they have spent the past few years overhauling an outdated portfolio, and are starting to see encouraging results.

“We feel more comfortable and confident with how our portfolio is constructed today,” said James Moore, president and CEO of the University of Illinois Foundation. “We’re in a much better position regardless of what happens in the economy.”

Under chief investment officer Travis Shore, who joined the foundation in 2022 as part of a plan to turn the endowment around, the private markets portfolio — which makes up roughly one-third of the endowment — now targets more growth opportunities in the new digital economy.

“The inherited private portfolio had a lot of real assets, emerging markets, frontier markets, but there was not a lot of North American buyouts; there was a lack of VC and growth equity,” Shore told Institutional Investor. “We have a lot of that now.”

Shore’s team has also turned over nearly 90 percent of its public market holdings, exiting underperforming legacy investments and redeploying capital. “Now, our public portfolio is immensely liquid,” Shore said. “But my golden rule is never be a forced seller. And we won’t under my watch.”

The paper’s authors argue that the Urbana-based school’s endowment would be nearly $4.1 billion today if its investments had kept pace with benchmark returns over the past decade. While Moore acknowledges the endowment’s performance issues, he says the foundation has been working on fixing that for years, and the paper does not address the illiquid investments, contractual commitments, and restructuring costs the team inherited. 

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“We didn’t need a paper to tell us we had a performance issue; we recognized it a number of years ago,” Moore said. 

Performance has been an issue. Last year, the foundation’s endowment pool returned a net 3.3 percent for its 2025 fiscal year, well below its 13.2 percent benchmark and far below peers. Shore attributed last year’s performance to completing a one-time $245 million secondary sale of legacy private market investments, which generated about $122 million in proceeds.

“We had a portfolio that was fully invested when I was onboarded in 2015,” said Moore, who had joined the foundation after leading the University of Arizona Foundation. “The program was not a balanced pool of assets, so the board and our investment policy committee decided to take a deeper look at where we were going and where the world is going.”

That ultimately led the foundation to take the program in a different direction, and to hire Vanderbilt University’s deputy CIO to build the investment team and update the portfolio. When Shore joined the foundation from Vanderbilt three years ago as CIO, the endowment “was redundant across private and public portfolios.” Its private markets portfolio was highly illiquid with “a lot of old economy assets” including banks, cyclical investments, real assets.

“It was an outdated portfolio,” Shore explained. “The new digital economy that emerged over the last 10, 15 years had a small footprint in the portfolio at the time, which contributed to the underperformance relative to other endowments. We had to introduce balance.”

After a strategic application of new economy sectors and a one-time sale of private market assets, Moore feels comfortable that the endowment is better positioned to weather storms than the previously constructed portfolio.

While performance has improved — its annualized returns for the one, three, and 10 years ending June were 9.7 percent, 4.7 percent, and 8.0 percent, respectively — it’s still below its benchmark of 17.6 percent while its peers are enjoying double-digit returns. Moore attributed underperformance to personnel and investment strategy changes following a comprehensive review that began in 2020.

Newer private market investments returned 28.6 percent in FY26 and a 12.1 percent annualized return over the past three years, with reported net asset value increasing to $630 million in June 2026 from $262 million the year before.