The Davids are starting to beat the Goliaths.

The New York Times reports.

In College Endowment Returns, Davids Beat the Goliaths

In the world of money management, bigger is often considered better. College and university endowments greater than $1 billion, for example, have long outperformed their smaller rivals.

That may be changing.

In the latest annual National Association of College and University Business Officers-Commonfund study of endowment performance, the smallest endowments— those under $25 million — edged out the biggest endowments, averaging a five-year annualized return of 10.6 percent to the $1 billion-plus category’s 10.4 percent.

Even more surprising, the top-performing endowments over 10 years among all schools reporting data weren’t giants like Harvard and Stanford or even Yale, known for its pioneering “Yale method” — investing in so-called alternative assets like hedge funds and private equity rather than just stocks and bonds. The Nacubo-Commonfund study does not publicly disclose the identities of schools in the rankings, but people who know the results told me the top-performing colleges are two Virginia universities whose financial resources amount to a negligible fraction of the typical Ivy League endowment.