{"id":129215,"date":"2026-08-23T10:37:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T10:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/129215\/"},"modified":"2026-08-23T10:37:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T10:37:09","slug":"harvards-playbook-why-korean-university-funds-lag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/129215\/","title":{"rendered":"Harvard’s Playbook: Why Korean University Funds Lag"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SallySally Scopa, a teaching assistant and Harvard undergraduate alumna, sits inside Harry Elkins Widener Library at Harvard University. The century-old Widener Library is the centerpiece of Harvard’s library system and is supported by the Harvard endowment. Photo: Harvard Management Company website.<\/p>\n

SpaceX’s major shareholders were disclosed for the first time on the 14th, local time. On a list crowded with Big Tech firms, private equity funds and pension funds, Harvard University stood out as the fifth-largest shareholder. Harvard poured $2.2 billion \u2014 more than 3 trillion won \u2014 into the single stock of SpaceX.<\/p>\n

Does Harvard have so much cash that it can casually bet some 3 trillion won? No. Harvard concentrated more than half of the money it had earmarked for listed stocks into SpaceX alone. Alphabet, Google’s parent, put the most money into SpaceX, but it was Harvard \u2014 staking half its holdings on a single stock \u2014 that made news. Among media outlets, the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson reported the investment details most thoroughly. After SpaceX, TSMC and the AI chipmaker Cerebras were among Harvard’s major holdings, and the university increased its stake in Nvidia, the Crimson reported.<\/p>\n

Who made such a bold decision? It was Harvard Management Company (HMC), which manages the university’s endowment to fund its operations. HMC’s chief executive came from JPMorgan, and its chief investment officer came from a family office that manages the money of wealthy individuals. Its board includes investment professionals such as the CEO of Hellman & Friedman, a private equity firm that even South Korea’s National Pension Service has asked to manage its money.<\/p>\n

Among them, HMC’s CEO \u2014 who earns $6.2 million (about 8.5 billion won) a year \u2014 along with the CIO and chief operating officer who execute the investments, none are Harvard graduates. In effect, the university treats itself like a corporation, bringing in outsiders and entrusting them with investments toward a single goal: stable returns. Although SpaceX at one point fell to around $108, below its offering price of $135, Harvard \u2014 a longer-term investor than even pension funds \u2014 does not take issue with short-term losses on a stock. That is the real reason Harvard could stake 3 trillion won.<\/p>\n

Harvard’s endowment posted an 11% return last year, growing the total fund to $56.9 billion (about 76 trillion won). Listed stocks account for about 14%, while 70% is entrusted to hedge funds, private equity funds and venture capital to invest in unlisted companies. One of the standout holdings in Harvard’s investment record was Coupang before its listing. Real estate investment, once a large share, has been steadily reduced to 5% now on the judgment that it was risky. It looks bold enough to concentrate more than half in a single stock, but behind the scenes it shed risk ahead of others. A strategy in which boldness and caution move as one is the essence of the Harvard style of investing. With the fund it has grown this way, Harvard covers 40% of its annual budget, spanning scholarships, faculty recruitment, research support, facility investment and social contributions.<\/p>\n

It is not that Korea has never considered this. Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), established on the basis of POSCO Holdings shares, showed early interest in growing its endowment through investment. It even visited Harvard to see firsthand how the fund is managed. Cha Sang-kyun, an emeritus professor at Seoul National University’s Graduate School of Data Science who founded a startup in Silicon Valley on memory chip technology and transferred that technology to global companies, has consistently called for overseas alternative investment by university endowments ever since. His belief is that where money flows, talent and technology follow along with returns.<\/p>\n

Yet there has been no word of a Korean university that grew its finances by investing its endowment well. POSTECH did at least see a 1 trillion won paper gain from its 2023 investment in POSCO Future M. POSTECH wanted to split the gains, providing some to the university and reinvesting some into the fund, but it struggled because of current law, which imposes a surtax and a gift tax on capital gains if money a university earns is not fully spent within three years.<\/p>\n

This regulation is precisely the opposite of that for U.S. university endowments. The United States does not tax money earned by university endowments, but it requires that only 5% be put into university finances at a time, with the rest reinvested. That was the reality in August 2023, when Seoul Economic Daily reported on university endowment investment. After three years of persuasion, a revised bill was at least passed to defer taxation for three years on stocks disposed of after January 1, 2026 \u2014 but that remains far from the United States, which does not tax at all. In the meantime, Harvard is pulling far ahead, investing in SpaceX with the money it earned from Coupang.<\/p>\n

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