In conjunction with the Trustees’ October Board Meeting held in Ithaca this past weekend, Cornell announced its investment performance for the year ending June 30, 2025.
Its 12.3% endowment return is among the top of the Ivies for 2024-25, second only to Columbia. In general, Cornell’s goal is “to achieve a total return, net of expenses, of at least 5% in excess of inflation (as measured by the Consumer Price Index) over rolling five year periods.”
While Cornell has not publicly released its goal calculation, the current Consumer Price Index is 3%, making Cornell’s target about 8%. So, Cornell’s Investment Office staff is meeting its expectations.
Here is an Ivy League comparison table:
| University | Return 2024-25 | Return 2023-24 |
| Columbia | 12.4% | 11.5% |
| Cornell | 12.3% | 8.7% |
| Penn | 12.2% | 7.2% |
| Brown | 11.9% | 11.3% |
| Harvard | 11.9% | 9.6% |
| Princeton | 11.0% | 3.9% |
| Dartmouth | 10.8% | 8.4% |
Cornell’s endowment is split up into 136,593,104.653874 shares. The endowment operates like a mutual fund, where share prices shift every month based on market fluctuations. When a gift is added to the endowment, the size of the gift is divided by the current share price and the gift becomes a fixed number of endowment shares. The income from these shares are then distributed to various funds that pay for different Cornell functions such as professorships, scholarships, and research.
As of June 30, 2025, Cornell’s endowment was worth $80.059134 per share, for a total of $10,935,525,618. Since then, the price per share has grown to $81.622349, for a total of $11.1 billion as of September 30, 2025. Cornell’s total endowment has thus increased by around 1.5% during the last calendar quarter.
The trustees have set the annual endowment payout for 2025-26 at $2.93 per share (about 3.6%), which means that the returns in excess of this amount will be retained in the per share price in the endowment to protect against the impact of future inflation or years of low returns.
Of particular interest this year is the amount of the endowment invested in private equity. This class of investments has historically done better than publicly traded stocks. However, some endowment managers are worried that private equity funds may be difficult to sell if an endowment needs greater liquidity to address financial challenges imposed by rapidly changing federal policies. Cornell has not announced a plan to reduce its private equity holdings. However, Harvard and Yale announced plans this year to sell $1 billion and $3 billion of their private equity holdings in the secondary market, respectively.
While Cornell has consistently released its annual investment performance, Cornell is becoming less transparent in sharing investment information with the public in other ways. Unlike prior years when the Cornell Investment Office quarterly report given to the Trustees was quickly shared with the public, Cornell now delays posting them by over 6 months.
