Yale's own reporting names buyouts, not a venture return

The record

Yale's own fiscal 2025 investment announcement, published by the university on 24 October 2025, states an 11.1% net investment return for the year ended 30 June 2025, representing $4.5 billion in gains, and an endowment value of $44.1 billion after $2.1 billion in distributions to the operating budget. It states a ten-year annualized return of 9.4%, which it says exceeded the median ten-year return for college and university endowments by about 1.4 percentage points and a 70/30 stock-and-bond portfolio by 2.2 points over the same period. Chief investment officer Matt Mendelsohn is quoted attributing the year's relative underperformance against public indices to 'underperformance in leveraged buyouts and, more meaningfully, real estate.'

What the sources establish

Yale's own Office of Institutional Research endowment summary, sourced to Yale's annual reports and Reports of the Treasurer, confirms the same $44,155 million market value for fiscal 2025 and shows the endowment's year-by-year market value back to 1968. The university's own overview of the endowment describes roughly 75% of the endowment as restricted to specific purposes and states a 5.25% annual spending target designed to smooth distributions against short-term swings in value. None of these three documents, as currently published, includes an asset-allocation table that states a percentage of the endowment held in venture capital specifically.

Scope and revision

Yale's CIO names leveraged buyouts and real estate as the categories that lagged in fiscal 2025, which shows the university is willing to name sub-asset-class performance in its own words, but the same announcement does not name venture capital's contribution one way or the other. This is a narrower disclosure than the asset-allocation tables some public pension funds in this pack publish, and a reader should not assume Yale's approach to disclosure matches every other endowment's, or that the absence of a venture figure here means Yale holds none. The documents examined describe Yale's current public reporting as retrieved on 16 September 2026; they do not represent everything Yale's investment office may disclose elsewhere or in the future.

The decision in front of you

A reader trying to size Yale's venture exposure from its own current public materials cannot do so from these documents alone, and should say so rather than estimating a figure the university has not published. This is editorial: the absence of a number is itself informative about what Yale currently discloses, distinct from a pension fund's board materials that list every fund by name.

• Does the document you are citing name a specific asset class's performance, or only the endowment's single blended return?
• Are you assuming Yale's disclosure practice matches another endowment's or pension fund's practice without checking Yale's own materials?
• Is the return you are quoting Yale's fiscal-year figure, matched to the same 30 June date across all three of Yale's own sources?

Yale's own announcement is precise about its blended return and its long-term spending discipline; on venture capital specifically, the honest reading of these three sources is that they are silent.