Mara Gordon | Making the campaign count

Penn certainly puts on a good show.

The capital-campaign kickoff party this weekend pulled out all the stops. Free food, free beer, lots of red and blue. It was a party worthy of an ambitious $3.5 billion fundraising goal, the amount the University hopes to raise by 2012.

It seems to be working, at least so far. President Amy Gutmann sent out a gushing e-mail to the entire Penn community on Saturday night saying that the campaign has already raised $1.6 billion. Only a few billion more to go! But all the glitz and free booze couldn't cover up one basic fact: Penn doesn't manage those donations as well as it should. And that means that students aren't reaping the full benefits of alumni gifts.

Don't get me wrong - I think giving back to Penn is a wonderful cause. Large or small, donations help pay for better financial aid, better faculty, better facilities. I even gave 20 bucks to the senior-class gift drive, because I wanted to donate what I could to a university I love.

But many of the big gifts - the kind University administrators were looking for this homecoming weekend - go straight into Penn's endowment, a fund that officials have consistently mismanaged for years.

The University's endowment currently stands at $6.6 billion, a number that sounds pretty big. And the endowment needs to be big: It helps pay for almost every aspect of daily life here at Penn.

Unfortunately, this is one area where Penn should have an inferiority complex. Compared to some of our Ivy League peers, our endowment is small change. Harvard's is $34.9 billion; Yale's is $22.5 billion.

Clearly, we need to catch up.

The endowment is only as useful as Penn officials make it. Penn's Chief Investment Officer Kristin Gilbertson and her staff invest the endowment which (in theory) leads to increased returns. That means more money for the things we experience every day.

Historically, Penn has gotten returns on its investments in the single digits.

Compare that to what our Ivy League competitors to the north have been able to do.

Take 2005, for example. Penn managed a measly 8.5 percent returns on its investments, while Yale saw 22.2 percent and Harvard earned 19.5. These numbers are only a sampling of a long-established trend.

So not only do other Ivy League schools have bigger endowments for smaller student bodies, their investment officers have also been able to manage their money significantly better.

Harvard and Yale, of course, are the exception to the rule. Most other universities don't invest their endowments nearly as well, nor do they have such astronomical amounts of money to work with. Both universities have generated headlines around the country for their exceptional investing savvy.

That's all well and good, but isn't Penn the university with the greatest business school in the world?

"There were a number of alumni, particularly in finance . [who said,] 'I can make a lot more money with my money than you can,'" said John Zeller, who spearheads Penn's fundraising efforts.

To Penn's credit, this past fiscal year was a definite improvement. University officials reported 20.2 percent returns on its investments.

This is a number Wharton alums can be more proud of. Penn performed on a level comparable with Harvard, which managed 23 percent returns. But we still lagged behind Yale, which led the pack with 28 percent.

But for our capital campaign to have any kind of lasting impact, Penn officials need to prove that they can consistently achieve those kinds of results.

It's not about competing with Harvard and Yale. It's about showing alumni that their donations will be put to good use.

Mara Gordon is a College senior from Washington D.C. Her e-mail address is gordon@dailypennsylvanian.com

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