# Elite Colleges Can Give You an Investing Lesson

**By:** Spencer Jakab  
**Published:** 2026-10-23T10:35:00.000Z  
**Source:** [The Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/elite-colleges-can-give-you-an-investing-lesson-699dc432)

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https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/elite-colleges-can-give-you-an-investing-lesson-699dc432

Plus, bonds got their mojo back

Thursday was stressful for people who checked their portfolios—especially if they owned hard-hit Meta or data-center stocks. But it was reassuringly normal in another way: The Treasury market acted like it used to, providing an offset. They had their best day in more than a year with the 10-year note’s yield falling sharply to well below 5%. Stock futures are mixed ahead of the open and oil is higher again on Middle East security jitters.
It’s vanity
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to make average investing returns. Sometimes it helps not being one.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that its massive endowment, managed by executives who earn more than the university’s president, earned 10.3% during its fiscal year ended in June. That’s less than half of what an S&P 500 index fund earned.
MIT’s results are more surprising during a tech boom that it might seem uniquely equipped to harness. Harvard and Stanford’s endowments, which held big stakes in SpaceX acquired before its IPO, jumped 27.1% and 31.7%, respectively. The University of North Carolina, which had more than a tenth of its endowment in that stock, did even better.
As uplifting as one-year moonshots are, big college endowments offer tuition-free lessons these days about how not to invest. Special access to mostly so-so but costly private equity, hedge and venture-capital funds has seen their returns lag what mom and pop investors could have made over the past decade. Meanwhile, infrequent fund value updates give endowments a false appearance of stability. Only 14% of Harvard’s is directly in publicly traded stocks and just 3% in bonds.