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Governance And Policy | Insights Blog
Tax Regime of Higher Education and Nonprofits Set to Change
On May 12th 2025, the House Ways and Means Committee released its budget proposal that includes major tax changes that, if passed, would apply to many endowments and foundations as described below....
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Investment Strategy | Articles
CIO Roundtable: Meeting Complexity and Uncertainty with Clarity

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Perspectives | Index
Higher Education Price Index Forecast May 2025
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Investment Strategy | Articles
Viewpoint | Top Concerns for Community Foundations: Donor-Advised Fund Regulations
Potential regulations on donor-advised funds (DAFs) and their effect on the philanthropic sector was the most-cited concern among community foundations in this year’s Council on...
Perspectives | Press Releases
FY23 NACUBO-Commonfund Study Released
U.S. Higher Education Endowments Report 7.7% Return for FY23 While Spending More in Support of Their Missions 50th anniversary NACUBO-Commonfund Study shows participating colleges and universities...
Governance And Policy | Videos
2025 Policy Outlook: What Endowments and Foundations Should Know
Looking back at 2024, uncertainty was the name of the game: inflation, interest rates, market volatility, emerging technology, recession potential, and geopolitical risks all played a role. As we...
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Responsible Investing | Articles
Insights from Institutionally-Related Foundations
Last month at Commonfund Forum 2025, we convened senior leaders of institutionally-related foundations (IRFs) to discuss trends among their institutions and peers uncovered in the FY2024... Learn More
Investment Strategy | Articles
CIO Roundtable: Is the Endowment Model a Crowded Trade?
Stuck in the past or ever-evolving? The endowment model gets a hard look eight years into the current market cycle. With core tenets of the endowment model seemingly under stress for the last several...

Perspectives | Articles
Viewpoint: Counting the Cost
How much does investment management cost? Fiduciaries, donors and stakeholders at endowed institutions have a strong interest in finding a good answer to this question, particularly in this era of...

Perspectives | Videos
No More Gatekeepers
In this Commonfund Forum Spotlight, founder of DonorsChoose.org Charles Best shares how as a 24-year-old teacher at a Bronx high school, he created a model of giving hailed as "the future of...

Perspectives | Videos
Monkeynomics
In this Commonfund Forum 2017 Spotlight, Dr. Laurie Santos demonstrates that primates have much to teach us about our own economic decision-making. Both monkeys and humans know a bargain when they...

Investment Strategy | Private Equity Insights
Venture Capital - Looking Forward and Upward
Beginning in the second half of 2015, there was growing caution that started to impact pricing and investment activity in early 2016. This valuation cooling period and subsequent shift in mindset...

Perspectives | Spotlight
Center for Natural Lands Management
These words—to protect, preserve and defend—come from the oath of office sworn by the President of the United States. At the Center for Natural Lands Management (CNLM), they refer to an unwritten but...

Governance And Policy | Articles
Viewpoint: A Firmer Foundation
How long is the long term? A year ago, private and community foundations appeared to many observers to have recovered from the losses suffered in the 2008–09 global financial crisis. Double-digit...

Perspectives | Spotlight
The William Penn Foundation
Fast Philly facts: The city is the site of the first library, hospital, medical school, stock exchange and zoo in the U.S. It’s the only World Heritage City in the U.S. William Penn founded the city...

Investment Strategy | Articles
Active Management Fatigue and What to Do About It
Active management has struggled for several years, raising questions about whether active management can ever outperform again. Traditional active manager style tilts, like value and size, have...

Commonfund Forum | Articles
What’s Next for Cash Investors?
In the static low-rate environment of recent years, it seemed as though there was no “what’s next” for cash. Today, that has changed, as there are major forces reshaping the regulatory and interest...

Investment Strategy | Articles
Ideas for Next Gen Energy Investing
Advances in alternative energy technologies promise to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. Largely, however, they remain just that—a promise. So, where are the opportunities to invest in...

Investment Strategy | Articles
Unhedged Commentary: The $3 Trillion Question
Reprinted from Institutional Investor’s Alpha Spring 2016 issue The growth of the hedge fund industry over the past decade has been tremendous, with more and more institutional and retail investors...