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Charles Skorina & Company

● RETAINED EXECUTIVE SEARCH ●

Our Clients: Boards & Trustees, C-suite Executives, Family Offices
Our Services: we recruit board members, chief investment officers, senior asset managers

Brooke Jones, selected as first CIO at Bryn Mawr

8yrs at Carnegie Corp, 3yr Stanford MC, Fulbright Scholar, MBA Stanford, BS, U Penn Wharton

Kim Y. Lew, new CIO (Oct 2020) at Columbia IMC

13yrs Carnegie Corp, 10yrs Ford Fdn, Chemical Bnk, MBA Harvard, BS U Penn Wharton

Dekia M. Scott, newly promoted to CIO at Southern Company

19yrs at Southern Company. MBA Emory, BA Spelman College

Michael D. Pia, new CIO at $1.9bn Texas A&M Fdn

Mr. Pia recruited from TRS Tx (13yrs), x Lockheed Martin, x US Marine Corp 11yrs, MBA Tx Christian, MS U West Florida, BS US Naval Academy

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SKORINA IN THE NEWS

9-27-19 The Boston Globe: Harvard endowment underwhelms again

8-9-19 Bloomberg News: Yale’s David Swensen and His Alums Are Among Best-Paid Endowment Heads

5-7-19 Institutional Investor: Fight Over Pay Erupts at New Mexico’s Pension Fund men

5-7-19 Pensions & Investments: Endowments led by women outperform those led by men

5-7-19 Institutional Allocator: Shortfall in Women CIOs at Endowments is Mysterious

Endowments and Donors Can’t Save Higher Ed

American colleges, cultural institutions, and health systems are in deep trouble.

Tuition, room and board revenue, government aid, donor gifts, visitor and patient revenue have all collapsed.

Staff and pay cuts have hit many of the well-known institutions we work with and more are in the works.

College campuses are hard hit

Terry Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education, estimated in a recent PBS interview that colleges and universities have taken an aggregate twenty percent hit to their budgets so far in 2020.

Most schools think 2021 will be much worse.

The late Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma) predicted a few years ago that half of America’s 4000 colleges and universities would go bankrupt in the next decade or two, as online education “disrupts” the business models of traditional institutions and runs them out of business.

With the accelerated shift to on-line learning thanks to the Covid-19 crisis, parents and students are up in arms against the price of a college education. Mr. Hartle cites $8 billion in refunds this spring just for room and board cancellations.

The cost crisis in higher education has been fermenting for years as states cut education budgets and colleges jacked up tuition and fees.

Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at NYU, points out that tuition has jumped two-and-a-half times in twenty years while the educational “product” has essentially stayed the same.

But the reckoning was delayed by waves of full-fee foreigners and full-recourse student loans.

As students grow accustomed to remote coursework, one wonders how many families will be willing to pay forty thousand and more per year for an off-site experience indistinguishable from every other.

Endowments and donors can only do so much

Our system of higher education – including the great private universities and the endowments that support them – is a key asset in our national preeminence.

Endowment capital has been a bedrock source of support for generations of students and faculty, but it takes a long time to accumulate and it’s very tempting to plunder.

Cambridge, the wealthiest university in Europe, took over 800 years to amass an endowment of $9.3 billion. Harvard's $41 billion took 382 years to accrue. Upstart Stanford University grew its endowment to $27.7.4 billion in "just" 135 years.

And that "hoarded" wealth drove performance; American universities dominate the rankings of global higher education.

Denuding a university's long-term legacy to plug short-term budgetary holes may be politically expedient but it merely postpones the inevitable plunge off the fiscal cliff.

Time to cut the fat

Voluntary support from alumni, foundations, corporations, and religious groups have helped our higher-education system grow at an unparalleled rate while achieving remarkable diversity and unquestioned world leadership.

But donors, endowments, and flush foreigners can’t save higher education from the inescapable abyss without fundamental changes in costs and delivery.

Re-engineering and re-pricing the college experience at a level families can afford is daunting but essential if we wish to maintain the level of excellence we’ve enjoyed since our nation's beginning.

University alumni and endowment staffs have stepped up time and again to support their schools when the going got rough.

It’s time for our universities and colleges administrators to do the same.

Kim Lew, Columbia Endowment’s next CEO, Shattering the Glass Ceiling

African-American investment professionals. . . better late than never!

Last week Columbia University announced that Ms. Kim Y. Lew, chief investment officer and thirteen-year veteran of the Carnegie Corporation, will join Columbia’s $10.9 billion Investment Management Company as CEO on November 2nd.

She won’t have far to move. Her new office is located about eight blocks south and three blocks east of her present location in mid-town Manhattan.

This hire is a big deal and the search committee -- Columbia University’s board of directors, President Lee C. Bollinger, and EVP of finance Anne Sullivan -- shattered several glass ceilings when they welcomed Ms. Lew on board.

Gender is a formidable barrier for females in finance. On our latest list of the top one hundred endowment chief investment officers pre-Ms. Lew, there are only sixteen women.

[This is pre-Kim Lew and Brooke Jones, both moves announced last week. Ms. Jones was Kim Lew’s investment director and will move to Bryn Mawr College as CIO next month. Dekia Scott, 19 years at Southern Company, was promoted to CIO in June]

Fortunately, Columbia’s search committee was more interested in talent and ability than race, gender, or religion when they selected Ms. Lew.

[Our full interview with Ms. Lew is just below]

We see a lot of boilerplate in the nonprofit world about how “we don’t discriminate.”

But, truth be told, if you are a woman, or more pointedly, an African-American woman in asset management, you face gale-force headwinds as you scale the institutional precipice.

How bad is it?

For over thirty years we have followed the careers of several thousand investment heads at Wall Street investment and money center banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, and nonprofits.

Within our global database we have about six-hundred-fifty chief investment officers at endowments, foundations, hospitals, public pensions, associations, and charities. . . yet we can find only fifteen African-American CIOs among them, a minuscule two percent, of which, with the recent promotions of Ms. Jones, and Scott, seven are female.

The dismal reality is that an African-American woman working in institutional investment management has a better chance of storming her way across the Korean DMZ than becoming a chief investment officer at a major American endowment or foundation.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICERS

AT US TAX-EXEMPT INSTITUTIONS

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ENDOWMENTS

Kim Y. Lew, CEO (Oct 2020), Columbia U Investment Mgmt. Co.

Brooke Jones, CIO (Oct 2020), Bryn Mawr College

Charmel Maynard, CIO/Treasurer, U of Miami, FL

Frank Bello, CIO Howard U

Robert "Danny" Flanigan Jr., CIO/Treasurer, Spelman College

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FOUNDATIONS

Joseph Boateng, CIO, Casey Family Programs

Rukaiyah Adams, CIO, Meyer Memorial Trust

Nickol Hackett, CIO, Joyce Foundation

Bola Olusanya, CIO, The Nature Conservancy

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CORPORATE PENSIONS

Dekia M. Scott, CIO, Southern Company

Bryan Lewis, CIO, US Steel

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PUBLIC PENSIONS

Mansco Perry III, ExecDir/CIO, MN State Board of Investments

Angela Miller-May, CIO, Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund

Cheryl Alston, CIO, Employees Retirement Fund City of Dallas

Alex Done, CIO, Bureau of Asset Management, NYC retirement system

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Source: Charles Skorina & Company

[Our apologies if we have missed anyone. Please email me if you’re not on the list]

Kelli Washington, managing director of investments at the Cleveland Clinic, wrote an excellent op-ed piece for ai-CIO magazine about what it’s like to be an African-American woman in finance.

And Vicki Fuller, former CIO at the New York Commons, was kind enough to share her views on being female and African-American on Wall Street and at the Commons in our interview two years ago.

We should mention that Columbia is not the only eminent New York institution to give women and minorities a fair shot.

The honorable Thomas P. DiNapoli, state comptroller, has led the charge for years, promoting Raudline Etienne, then Vicki Fuller, and now Anastasia Titarchuk to the top investment position at the $207bn New York Commons.

But, as we see from the data, these are rare exceptions.

When I interview women in the investment industry and ask how they first became interested in investment finance, it’s almost always because early on they had a role model.

Someone in the family or a family friend, someone they met in high school or college who worked in finance and took the time to explain what they did and why they liked the job.

Let’s hope the entire investment community will follow Columbia’s example and hire, develop, and promote more role models like the intrepid band of women (and men) cited in this piece.

Ms. Kim Y. Lew, a Bronx Story

CHARLES A. SKORINA & COMPANY works with leaders of Endowments, Foundations, and Institutional Asset Managers to recruit Board Members, Executives Officers, Chief Investment Officers and Fund Managers.

Mr. Skorina also publishes THE SKORINA LETTER, a widely-read professional publication providing news, research and analysis on institutional asset managers and tax-exempt funds.

Our Practice:

• We recruit Board Members and Executive Officers, Chief Investment Officers and Senior Asset Managers.

• Our research and analytics are backed by over thirty years of hands-on recruiting experience and an unrivaled personal network.

• We collect performance, compensation, and background data on most senior institutional investment professionals in the U.S. and the funds they manage. We analyze that data to construct profiles of those managers and their funds, identify best-in-class people, and map their career trajectories.

• We share our research and insights in a widely-read professional newsletter – THE SKORINA LETTER – and website – www.charlesskorina.com.

• The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Thompson Reuters, Financial Times (Fundfire), Institutional Investor, Pensions & Investments, Private Equity International, and the institutional investment community use our research and analysis. Skorina has been interviewed on chief investment officer compensation issues on Bloomberg TV.

• Our work is regularly re-printed in Allaboutalpha.com and other industry magazines, blogs, and third- party web postings.

• We focus specifically and effectively on the world we know: Board members and Executive Officers, Chief Investment Officers, and Senior Asset Managers at institutional investment firms and funds – including sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations, pension funds, banks, investment banks, outsourced chief investment officer firms (OCIO), and sell-side money managers.

Prior to founding CASCo, Mr. Skorina worked for JP MorganChase in New York City and Chicago and for Ernst & Young in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Skorina graduated from Culver Academies, attended Michigan State University and The Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey where he graduated with a BA, and earned a MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago. He served in the US Army as a Russian Linguist stationed in Japan.

Charles A. Skorina & Co. is based in Tucson, Arizona.

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