‘Big Challenges’

“There are still big challenges out there,” Walda said on a teleconference Wednesday. “We need to have good returns in the years to come to hit that target rate.”

Texas A&M University, whose money is managed in conjunction with the University of Texas, also saw a jump in the size of its endowment -- 27 percent to $11.1 billion. It held onto its seventh-place ranking in the annual survey.

In addition to investment returns, donations and spending on school operations affect the value of college endowments. The survey, which tracked 832 institutions with $516 billion of assets, found that the average spending rate from endowments was 4.4 percent in 2014, unchanged from the previous year.

Of schools with endowments of more than $1 billion, only one lost money last year: Yeshiva University, which shrunk 7.6 percent to $1.09 billion, the study found. The Jewish school in New York has struggled to balance its budget since it lost about $100 million when Bernard Madoff, a trustee, was revealed to be a fraud in December 2008.

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