Lily Kim, Head of Investments for the University of Utah, explains the endowment’s mission to provide financial stability and ensure access to quality education for students. She discusses how the endowment serves 37,000 students with plans to grow to 40,000, and emphasizes the important role of hedge funds and private credit investments in managing risk and protecting capital during market volatility. Kim highlights the symbiotic relationship between investment managers and the university, where successful partnerships ultimately benefit students by maintaining educational quality and resources across generations.
Key takeaways:
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Protecting and growing the University of Utah’s endowment helps ensure long-term access to high-quality education for current and future students.
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Hedge funds and private credit play an important role in preserving capital, managing risk, and maintaining financial stability during periods of market volatility, allowing the endowment to meet its obligations regardless of market conditions.
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By supporting steady endowment growth and reducing the impact of market downturns, alternative investments help fund educational opportunities and resources for more than 37,000 students, creating lasting benefits for future generations.
Transcript:
The mission of endowment at the University of Utah is to provide financial stability in order to ensure that the brightest students have access to high quality, top education. I’m Lily Kim, and I’m the head of investments for the University of Utah.
Role at the university is to protect and grow the assets of the endowment. The beneficiaries of endowment are the thirty seven thousand students and we have a goal of increasing that in the near future to forty thousand. Hedge funds and private credit investments play a significant role in helping college and university endowments manage risk, protect capital, and avoid losses, especially during periods of market volatility or economic downturn. Whether the markets are up, the markets are down, there are needs that need to be met.
The critical thing that an endowment provides is stability and to meet those demands to ensure that all students and all stakeholders are able to access the same quality of education and resources and learning that all the previous generations also benefited from. You need hedge funds and you need your managers and you need your partners to truly step up and provide that quality. And it’s a great symbiotic relationship where they win and I win and when we win together the students win and that’s the number one goal and objective. The endowment grows, the dreams grow and we want that to be correlated.
I hope it continues to be a legacy far beyond anything that even I could have ever hoped or envisioned.
