Princeton's endowment loses its spot as top Ivy League earner to Brown

Wikimedia Commons

• Princeton University's endowment lost its spot as the top earner in the Ivy League to Brown in fiscal 2019.
• The university generated 6.2% returns, which trailed Brown's 12.4%.
• All Ivy League schools posted year-over-year declines in return rate, as shifts to riskier investments and a new tax on investment gains bit into earnings.
• Dartmouth took second place, and the University of Pennsylvania took third. Princeton fell to fifth place in the 2019 ranking.
• Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.

Princeton University's endowment has lost its spot as top Ivy League performer to Brown University.

Princeton saw returns of 6.2% for fiscal year 2019, which fell short of Brown's 12.4% gain for the. That double-digit growth still fell below Princeton's 2018 return of 14.2%.

Princeton fell to fifth place among the eight Ivy League institutions. Dartmouth has the second highest rate of return in 2019, while University of Pennsylvania took third place.

The fiscal year for university endowments ends June 30.

Every member of the group posted lower gains in 2019 than in the year prior, with market volatility and shifting strategies biting into fund performance. Many university endowments moved capital from equities to riskier investments like hedge funds in recent years. The decision hasn't played to universities' favor, with nearly all college endowments underperforming the S&P 500 in 2019.

Many elite universities, including Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, will also see their 2019 gains slashed by new federal tax on investment gains. The tax of 1.4% will hit the schools' net investment returns for fiscal 2019.

Here is the latest ranking of Ivy League endowment returns, listed in increasing order of 2019 returns. All data is sourced from Bloomberg:

Read more: Nobel laureate Robert Shiller forewarned investors about the dot-com and housing bubbles. Now he tells us which irrational market behaviors have him most worried.