| Stanford did not pioneer investments in alternative assets classes (VC/PE etc...) Robert Swenson of the Yale endowment fund was much earlier than that. It also became known as the "Yale Model" === For the two decades after Swensen took over as manager of Yale’s endowment in 1985 (just five years after he’d gotten his economics Ph.D at Yale), this worked spectacularly well — with a 16.1% annualized return compared with 12.3% for the S&P 500 and a remarkable record of sailing through stock market downturns that pummeled most other institutional investors. https://hbr.org/2010/04/why-the-yale-model-of-investin/
=== The prevalence of Swensen acolytes in leadership posts highlights how dominant the Yale investment model has become among major U.S. universities. Colleges and universities ended 2014 with 51% of their portfolios invested in less-traditional fare like hedge funds, private equity and real estate that Yale favors—nearly double the allocation to those investments in 2001, according to annual surveys done by Nacubo and Commonfund. http://www.wsj.com/articles/universities-look-to-yale-for-in...
=== Swensen’s idea, implemented at Yale and copied nationwide, was that universities should shift their endowment money out of traditional investments such as stocks and bonds and into higher-yielding ones like private equity, hedge funds, and real estate. The Yale model, as it came to be known, perennially outperformed stodgier strategies, gaining Swensen gurulike adulation. http://upstart.bizjournals.com/executives/2009/03/18/David-S...
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