Endowments are reserves of corporate and private donations universities invest to make money.
Generally, schools keep the principal in tact, spending only the interest, which can be used for anything from special chairs for faculty to student scholarships to capital improvements. JCSU's endowment market value has more than doubled since the beginning of the 90's. The increased financial aid required to maintain competitive scholarship programs, the growing infrastructure of the University, and the ability to sustain a first rate faculty dictate that we will have to do more to keep pace with the endowment growth of the past few years. Financial stewardship is taken very seriously. Our measure is that fund managers should exceed national indices of return by at least 2 percentage points.