Pimco's Endowments

Jenny Anderson moves the El-Erian story forwards today, talking to a number of former endowment chiefs about how tough the job is, and finding one startling statistic:

Nationally, more than 40 percent of the top investment executives within universities and endowments left in 2005 and 2006, according to a 2007 compensation survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting (now Mercer) that excluded Harvard and Yale.

Now 2005 and 2006 were admittedly exceptional years, the height of the hedge-fund bubble, when anybody with experience in the alternative-investments space became incredibly valuable. So I'm sure the 40% number will fall in the near future.

But Anderson also notes that a lot of endowment managers are now setting up companies which seek to pool and manage endowments specifically. Given that El-Erian knows all about endowments at this point, and that he is helping to move Pimco into the alternative-investments space, it stands to reason that he'll be going after the smaller-endowment market himself.

Eventually, he could end up running just as much endowment money at Pimco as he was at Harvard.