Overview

At the University of California, we’re all about inclusion. As the world’s premier public research university, we educate hundreds of thousands of students every year and enable technological and scientific breakthroughs that better the lives of people everywhere. Now we’re adding financial opportunity to the list— and we’re just getting started with our plans.

At UC Investments, we invest some $180 billion on behalf of the university, making us one of the largest institutional investors in the country. Our scale alone affords us opportunities to grow wealth that individual investors simply do not have.

But an institution is its people, and UC’s students, faculty, staff, alumni, and retirees are our people. Shouldn’t they have the same opportunities to grow their individual wealth as the university has to grow its own? That’s what we mean by democratizing finance. We hope to give UC’s people a simple way to build wealth that will sustain them well beyond their years at this great institution of ours.

Our Blue and Gold Endowment Pool marks our first step. This 100% passively invested fund returned 15.7% at the end of the 2023- 2024 fiscal year and the year prior it was 13.3%, making it the highest performing of UC’s six financial products for two years in a row. We launched the fund on March 31, 2019 with $250 million to give our 10 campuses and six academic health centers a liquid and high-returning alternative to the traditional endowment. As of June 30, 2024, the Blue and Gold had risen to $6.9 billion, up from $2.7 billion the year before, an increase that included substantial new investments from our university clients.

But now you don’t need to be a campus or a medical center to invest. As of July 1, 2024, the 352,600 individual UC investors in our defined contribution plan, Retirement Savings, are able to invest in the same Blue and Gold Endowment Pool in which the university as an institution invests, at the same extremely low cost.

Democratizing the Blue and Gold is just a start. We’re thinking big—about investment opportunities for our 295,573 students, within our alumni network of more than 2 million people, and the list goes on. We’re thinking about new financial products and new ways to put democracy and finance together for the benefit of both.

Within the next 10 years, we hope to help grow the wealth of our individual UC stakeholders at virtually every stage of their lives.