The results are finally in (thank you, Brown) for the 2011 performance rankings of the eight Ivy League endowments. They are ordered below from the worst percentage return to the best.

If you can’t guess the winner (of course, you’re all winners, like little league), we won’t spoil the fun. You’ll just have to page through to see if you’re right.

We also throw in a few other interesting tidbits, such as average annual performances over the last decade (although not every school reported this).

Being a private equity crew, what you may care most about is how each school did with its buyout investments. Again, we included all the information we could find, but not everyone is as forthcoming as Yale, Harvard and Cornell (hint, hint, to everyone else…).

Two new studies reveal that university endowments, battered by the recent economic crisis, have begun to grow again, adding fresh resources to the pool of funds they can commit to private equity and other investments.

Endowments grew on average by 11.9 percent in fiscal year 2010, which ended June 30th, according to a study released by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and Commonfund, a big investor for non-profit institutions. That gain is a stark reversal from FY2009, when the average endowment lost 18.7 percent.

Adding to the improving picture, universities had a slightly easier time raising new funds in 2010. They received about $7 billion in gifts destined specifically for their endowments, representing about a quarter of the $28 billion in overall donations that universities took in last year, according to Ann Kaplan, author of a separate study from the Council for Aid to Education, or CAE. Giving was up 0.5 percent during 2010, a stark change from the previous year when donations slipped by 11.9 percent.

At the end of 2009, Reuters Buyouts sought to answer whether primary fundraising would suffer as a result of secondary market investments in its “Secondary Market Threatens To Use Up All The Oxygen” piece.

It didn’t work out that way. During the credit crisis, limited partners faced few capital calls, and if anything, secondary sales froze up along with markets everywhere. But as secondary sales become increasingly common, the prospect of future fundraisings being impacted grew.

I got to thinking about this after New York secondaries firm Lexington Partners Inc. announced a deal Wednesday to buy a PE portfolio worth £470 million ($730 million) from Lloyds Banking Group.

Yale University’s investment office yesterday disclosed that it had voted last June to increase its target private equity allocation from 21% to 26 percent. This came amid mounting private equity losses, but was portrayed by many media outlets as “contrarian” investment chief David Swensen sticking to his guns.

In reality, however, Swensen didn’t have much of a choice.

As of last June, Yale’s actual exposure to private equity was at 24.3 percent. That’s a major climb from 20.2% the prior year, and nearly 10 percentage points higher than Yale’s private equity allocation just four years earlier. In other words, raising the target allocation was largely an effort to reflect reality.

“But wait,” says rhetorical reader. “Why is Swensen raising the target even above current exposures, other than because he really believes in the asset class?” Well, I’m glad you asked.

BOSTON (Reuters) – Yale University Chief Investment Officer David Swensen’s losses on big bets in private equity, real estate and commodities have not deterred the noted contrarian.

Yale disclosed on Thursday that it had increased significantly its allocations to those sometimes risky and illiquid asset classes at the end of its last fiscal year in June, 2009.

“If diversification fails to protect a portfolio in the face of a financial panic, why bother to diversify?,” Swensen’s investment group wrote in the university’s annual endowment report released on Thursday. “The answer lies in the diversified portfolio’s lower risks and higher returns.”

As a result, Yale’s investment committee voted at the close of its fiscal year to increase its targeted allocation in private equity to 26 percent from 21 percent and in commodities and real estate to 37 percent from 29 percent, Yale disclosed in the report.