Harvard University’s $57bn endowment is facing a private-markets hangover: billions of dollars in unfunded commitments to private equity funds at a time when the university faces rising demands for cash.
The backlog has risen from $4.6bn in 2017 to $7.9bn in 2025, according to public records, a legacy of Harvard Management Company’s aggressive move into private capital investments in the last decade. People with knowledge of the matter said the figure remained “elevated” this year.
“It’s really this vicious circle that they have more and more of these commitments. The distributions just have not been coming in and the unfunded commitments pile up,” said Philip Casey, chief executive of Institutional LPs, a technology company that works with endowments. “The question is: have they been writing cheques that they can’t cash?”