Haven’t seen much material on this site regarding a career working for a university endowment/state investment board. Any detail on day-to-day, long-term outlook, personality types would be greatly appreciated.
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Working for an endowment offers a unique and rewarding career path, distinct from other finance roles. Here's what you need to know based on the most helpful WSO content:
Day-to-Day Responsibilities
Long-Term Outlook
Personality Types
Additional Insights
If you're considering this career path, it offers a blend of meaningful work, manageable hours, and exposure to diverse investment strategies, making it a compelling option for finance professionals.
Sources: Endowments & Foundations Part 1: A Basic Overview, Endowments & Foundations Part 1: A Basic Overview, Q&A - Analyst at $1.5B Endowment Fund, Q&A: Endowments, Foundations, & Asset Allocators
can be very good jobs. can make high 6 to 7 figures in 30s and not much stress and institutional stability. get to grill HF managers all day. hard job to get and arguably better than 60-70% of LO/HF jobs
idk to be honest. but know people in those seats (early mid 30s) at top endowments making v good money (stable too)and QOL
The pay isn’t nearly that high I think. Unless you’re high up and have decades of experience at a very large endowment
You can look up their pay as it’s usually disclosed.
Theres a wide spread in pay…and its a bit random among the top 30 privates in terms of how they pay
Public university pay is definitely a step below private
There's a running joke amongst State Treasurer's that if you've seen one Treasurer's office... you've seen one office. Point being - they may do similar things, but very few are structured or even run the exact same way.
I apply the same thing to asset owners - there's a lot of commonality from the outside, but internally they tend to be more varied from a role and path perspective relative to other LO AM, consultant, or OCIO careers that have similar functions. On the average asset owners tend to run leaner, with more/less consultant or outsourcing of various parts of their investment office, and individual roles will wear more hats. An 'investment analyst' could cover managers within, or across, various asset classes while simultaneously doing investment reporting or risk analytics on the portfolio. In some of the larger asset owners - you may even have teams that directly manage parts of the portfolio, say a portion of the FI sleeve.
I have little context on the pay for E&F outside of anecdotes putting it all over the place. I'd assume what others said, that publics will be lower and privates higher - with the latter, and especially the largest ones, effectively functioning as an asset management firm. On the public plan/state investment board side - you can readily look up most of them to see what they make. The trade off is generally more stability, better hours, some benefits - like pensions or even partial pensions depending on the system and status - for less overall compensation. It's still good but you are fare more capped than elsewhere.
Personalities are going to be similar to what you see across LO AM, consultants, and OCIO's - if anything, it tends to skew more to the academic side. It makes sense for the most part - you are looking at longer term horizons, broader moves and perspective vs. someone who is picking individual credits living day by day to outperform the aggregate.
Long term I think they will still be a coveted seat, with the same dynamics at play throughout the entire LO AM industry. Headcount is going down over time as firms scale up and competition pushes out marginal players. Even in the asset owner space - that will mean smaller and mid sized outsourcing their portfolios vs. hiring an entire staff to run it or simply running even leaner. I do think there's some risk, I don't know how much, of real follow through on the fervor around these tax exempt status of large, tens of billion dollar endowments, especially on higher ed. They will still need teams, however they may shift their focus a bit which will marginally limit hiring over the next few decades.
Addinator made lots of good points. I'll speak to what it's like working at a state investment board at the junior level but won't comment on long-term outlook as I don't feel experienced enough to answer.
Day-to-day: My fund is "small", so I do a bit of everything - investments, ops/manager compliance, and admin tasks. On the investments side, a typical day might include some meetings with prospective GPs, writing memos, reading articles, reading GP reports/keeping track of the portfolio, and researching things for my boss.
I find the work to be quite interesting. You need to know a bit about everything -- geopolitics; federal and state politics and legislation, if you work for a public university endowment or state investment board; macro; your primary asset class; other asset classes, etc. The allocators who inspire me the most are the ones who can synthesize deep, bottom-up knowledge of their asset class and portfolio with a broader understanding of how markets and portfolio construction fit together.
To my knowledge, larger endowments typically have larger teams segmented by asset class or investments/operations. For example, some of my Analyst peers may only be focused on one asset class and spend most of their day taking calls and writing memos, as well as keeping track of the portfolio. The degree of travel depends on the shop, but expect there to be a bit of travel to conferences or manager on-sites involved.
Personality types: From my limited experience, culture tends to be a lot more chill and down-to-earth than your stereotypical high finance roles. People come from a variety of backgrounds -- investment banking, credit, consultants, FoFs, direct investing, etc, which lead to a variety of perspectives. Agree with Addinator -- culture also tends to be more academic, theoretical, and abstract at times. People are curious and like to ask big-picture questions. For example, where will the private equity secondaries market be 10 years from now? What role will IPOs play as an exit avenue going forward?
People also tend to be quite extroverted, as a big part of the job is networking with other LPs and interviewing GPs. The pension/endowment/foundation space is very small -- people know each other and frequently bump into each other at conferences. LPs talk to each other a lot and bounce ideas off one another. It feels collegial and collaborative.
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