Cornell Below Average in Endowment Earnings
As with past practice, Cornell announces its endowment performance following a review at the October Board of Trustees meeting. Cornell released both a statement and its annual audited financial report, dated October 20, 2026.
Cornell’s investment goal is to earn 5% above the Consumer Price Index, in order to protect its 8,477 endowment accounts from the impact of inflation. Cornell earned 16.9% in the 2025-26 fiscal year.
The Cornell Board of Trustees sets the payout amount to the endowment accounts at 4.8%. Starting in FY26, the Board of Trustees updated the endowment payout policy, changing the lookback period from twenty-eight quarters to twenty quarters. This has the effect of making the payout higher in response to Cornell’s recent market growth.
Cornell’s standing among its peers is summarized in the following table showing the total endowment size as of June 30, 2026, as well as the yield or earnings on the endowment for the 2025-26 fiscal year. Columbia has not yet released its results and was omitted from the table.
| School | Size (Billions) | Earnings |
| Stanford | $40.8 | 31.7% |
| Penn | $31.1 | 27.4% |
| Harvard | $68.0 | 27.1% |
| Yale | $54.5 | 26.3% |
| Princeton | $42.3 | 23.7% |
| Brown | $9.0 | 19.6% |
| Dartmouth | $10.0 | 17.5% |
| Cornell | $13.6 | 16.9% |
| MIT | $29.2 | 10.3% |
| Average | $33.22 | 22.28% |
RELATED: Cornell Endowment Grows by 12.3% in 2025
The initial public offering (IPO) of Elon Musk’s SpaceX stock had a dramatic impact on those university endowments that had invested early in that stock before it went public. Reportedly, Harvard’s endowment held about $2.2 billion worth of SpaceX shares as of June 30, its largest ever single public equity holding. Although the fruits of the SpaceX IPO are reflected in June 30, 2026 year-end totals, the offering’s “lock-up” period has not yet expired, so the universities cannot yet sell their SpaceX shares. Since many universities have risk guidelines that limit large single-stock positions, the endowments that benefited from the SpaceX IPO may face pressure to sell down such highly concentrated positions once the lockups expire. SpaceX shows the profits that can be gained from investments in early-stage venture capital. Some early SpaceX investors earned 57 times their original investments.
Although Cornell has the lowest endowment per student of this group, there is a hidden benefit in such a relatively low endowment size. For the past few years, universities with endowments of over $500,000 per student were subject to a flat rate 1.4% excise tax on their endowment income. The Big Beautiful Bill passed last year adopted a graduated rate for the endowment excise tax. So Harvard and other large endowment schools face a hefty increase in their endowment excise taxes for 2026. In contrast, Cornell does not pay any excise tax on its endowment earnings.
As of June 30, 2026, Cornell’s total assets were $22,914,355,000, its liabilities were $6,296,536,000, and net assets were $16,617,519,000.
Some people argue that it is unfair to compare the Ivy League by endowment size, because only Cornell benefits from annual appropriations from the New York SUNY budget for the four statutory colleges. If one assumes that the $157 million appropriation had been paid out from a hypothetical endowment at 4.8%, then Cornell would rank in the Ivy League comparison at $16.9 billion.
