The University’s endowment recovered last fiscal year from the recession, performing in the top 10 percent of its peer institutions.
“For the past few years, LSU has fared fairly well,” said George Moss, chief investment officer at the LSU Foundation. “We’ve done really very well against our peers.”
An endowment is a large sum of money, usually donated, that institutions use to supplement their funding. The principal — the original sum — earns money through interest and investments, with which the institution bolsters its budget.
LSU has two main endowment “pools” — the general pool, over which the University has full control, and the Board of Regents pool, which is overseen by the state’s higher education governing board.
Moss said students should focus more on the general pool, because administrators have more control over how its returns are spent.
In the 2008-09 fiscal year, the University’s endowment, like endowments throughout the country, suffered damage to its investments from the infamous economic collapse.
The general pool took an 18.2 percent hit, Moss said.
This past fiscal year, however, the endowment recovered much of those losses.  
Moss said the general pool’s investments returned about 15 percent last year.
All things considered — investment performance is only one factor in growth — LSU’s endowment grew from more than $259 million in June 2009 to more than $289 million in June 2010.
“I don’t know if that’s necessarily extraordinary per se,” Moss cautioned.
Still, Moss said the Foundation had targeted returns “just shy of double digits.” The returns are more than Moss expected.
“We’re rebounding off the losses of the recession,” he said. “This news is encouraging.”
The University’s performance also outpaces many of its peer institutions.  
The National Association of College and University Business Officers releases statistics each year for endowments.  In both the 2008-09 and 2009-10 fiscal years, LSU performed significantly better than average.
NACUBO separates institutions into categories based on the size of their endowments. The University lands in the $100 million to $500 million bracket — the second smallest of six total brackets.
In that bracket, the University performed in the top third of institutions with similar-sized endowments in the 2008-09 fiscal year during the economic crisis.
Last year, as the economy recovered, the University’s returns were among the top 10 percent of its peer institutions.
In the past 10 years, LSU’s endowment is in the top 25 percent of its peer group, Moss said.
Normally, the larger endowments — like Harvard’s, Yale’s and Stanford’s — earn better returns than the smaller endowments, like LSU’s.
“That was flipped over during the recession,” Moss said.
 
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Contact Matthew Albright at [email protected]