For some 25 years, Yale's endowment has been its industry's shining city upon a hill, demonstrating to the masses the brilliance of institutional investing. Its chief investment officer, David Swensen, has become something of a celebrity, authoring a well-received how-to guide for everyday shareholders, as well as the occasional Op-Ed column.
The fund's reputation, however, owes to its earlier accomplishments. In the 10 years from mid-2008 through mid-2018 (the latter being the date of the fund's most recent report), Yale gained an annualized 7.4%. During that same time period, the three largest target-date 2035 mutual funds, from Vanguard, Fidelity, and T. Rowe Price, returned 7.3%, 6.7%, and 8.0%, respectively.
In other words, employees who barely even realized that they owned funds, because they had been defaulted into their 401(k)s, roughly kept pace with the nation's most-celebrated endowment portfolio. (As, of course, did those who selected their target-date funds intentionally.) Few would have anticipated such an outcome when Swensen's book was published in 2005.