Back to Glossary
Peer Benchmarking (NACUBO/Commonfund)
Definition
The NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments (NCSE) is the primary source of peer benchmarking data for U.S. endowments, collecting and publishing annual data on asset allocation, investment returns, spending rates, and governance practices across hundreds of institutions segmented by endowment size. Peer benchmarking allows investment committees to understand how their portfolio and policies compare to similar institutions and to identify areas where their approach deviates from common practice — either by deliberate choice or inadvertently.
In the Context of Endowment Management
While peer benchmarking is valuable context, it has an important limitation: it tells you what peers are doing, not whether they are doing the right thing. The dominance of rolling average spending rules, for example, is partly peer-driven convention rather than analytically optimized policy. Investment committees should use peer data as context but base their own decisions on quantitative analysis of their specific portfolio, mission, and constraints.