Posted on December 4, 2008

Commonfund, NACUBO to Create Joint Higher Education Endowment Study

The National Association of College and University Business Officers and the Commonfund Institute have announced a new partnership to create a single, comprehensive, annual study of higher education endowments.

The Commonfund Benchmarks Study of Educational Endowments will be merged with the NACUBO Endowment Study to become the 2009 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments (NCSE), a single annual report detailing endowment investment performance, asset allocation, and related finance and governance issues. The new report will cover fiscal year 2009, ending June 30, 2009, and will be released in January 2010.

Currently, each study includes some eight hundred institutions, with two-thirds of the respondents included in both. Going forward, the historical databases of the two surveys will be centralized and warehoused for access and use by higher education institutions and scholars. An online questionnaire requesting qualitative and quantitative information will be augmented by follow-up telephone interviews to identify qualitative issues and supporting trends underlying the numbers. The resulting report will be the single source for institutions to benchmark themselves against their peers.

"NACUBO is proud to partner with Commonfund, a highly respected leader in higher education financial management, to create a broader, more comprehensive analysis of higher education endowments," said NACUBO president and CEO John Walda. "The NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments will not only create a more efficient reporting process for higher education institutions and a more precise representation of their nonprofit endowments, but will also be a valuable resource for those who manage higher education financial assets."