While endowments and foundations had a strong fiscal year overall, the dispersion between the best and worst performers was huge as more outsourced chief investment officers enter private market assets and try different strategies.

New research from OCIO Analytics shows that the median return among 712 endowments and foundations in its peer universe was 15.3 percent for the 12 months ended June 30. Meanwhile, the 25th-percentile institutions returned 18 percent, and the 5th-percentile allocators returned 21.1 percent during this period. 

The three-year returns were also noteworthy. The median endowment among 465 institutions returned 12.8 percent, with the 25th percentile at 14.2 percent and the 5th percentile at 16.5 percent. (The size of the universe shrinks over time as the 57 OCIOs that submitted data have not had the clients for those longer periods of time.)

The gap between the top and bottom performers for the quarter ended June 30 was enormous: 13.1 percent across 921 institutions, the highest quarterly reading since the analytics firm started collecting data. For the one-year period, returns ranged from 21.1 percent to 3.1 percent, a spread of approximately 18 percent. 

Earlier this year, OCIO Analytics issued research showing that the gap between the top and bottom performers among foundations and endowments more than doubled in 2025, largely driven by portfolio construction decisions masked by strong equity markets. Allocators have recently expressed belief that manager selection will be the key to succeeding in private credit, which is why most are becoming more selective with their managers.

In a phone interview, Brad Alford, founder of OCIO Analytics, said the dispersion is occurring as “a lot of OCIOs are doing a lot of different things,” with some pursuing more private market strategies, while “others are getting big distributions from to unicorn private equity deals” like investments in SpaceX and Anthropic.

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“The numbers shocked me,” Alford told Institutional Investor. “It’s caused an astronomical dispersion.”

While Alford doesn’t know what’s driving the dispersion, he suspects it has to do with the differences in implementation. “Something’s going on. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not just the private assets,” he said. “Everyone wants to blame it all on privates, but it’s way more than that.” 

Alford added that part of the dispersion is connected to there being so many OCIOs. “There are a lot of players, so there’s going to be a lot of spread,” he said. “And those players will go away.”