Last year, brown had an amazing return on your endowment investment, 51 % returne in one year. So are you drug smuggling? What are you doing? How i far do you earn 51% on endowment? Seriously, i want to know. We're not taking excessive risk. The other thing we know is that within any asset class last year, we out performed our peers. It wasn't like, oh, we were all in one type of asset and that did well. I think the focus of the brown endowment team is on identifying the highest quality investors, people or high integrity.
Enrollment is down for the first time in memory, and critics complain college is too expensive, too elitist, and too politicized. The economist Chris Paxson — who happens to be the president of Brown University — does not agree. (Part 3 of “Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School.”)