Columbia University's Lang Fund

Columbia University's Lang Fund

Eugene Lang, the philanthropist and technology entrepreneur behind REFAC Technology Development Corporation, established the Lang Fund at Columbia Business School in 1996 with an initial gift. The fund operates as a student-run investment vehicle embedded within the School's curriculum, where MBA candidates source, diligence, and manage a portfolio of public equities. Lang, a 1940 Columbia College graduate known for his transformative philanthropy, structured the vehicle so that investment gains directly underwrite need-based scholarships — creating a self-reinforcing cycle of education finance. The fund focuses exclusively on long-only public equities, with students organized into sector teams that cover technology, healthcare, consumer, financials, and industrials. Each cohort runs a full investment process: screening ideas, building financial models, meeting management teams, and presenting recommendations to a faculty advisory board. Past student presentations have analyzed companies ranging from large-cap technology platforms to mid-cap healthcare services firms, though the fund does not publicly disclose current holdings. The vehicle operates on a rolling calendar aligned with the academic year, with new student managers taking responsibility each fall. Unlike a typical endowment pool, the Lang Fund carries an explicit educational mandate alongside its financial objective. The program runs within the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing, which anchors Columbia's value-investing tradition. Student managers draw on the Center's network of alumni practitioners and adjunct faculty — including prominent fund managers who guest-lecture and mentor deal teams. This structure provides access to management meetings and sell-side research that mirrors a professional small-cap or mid-cap equity fund, while maintaining the governance of a university-supervised account. The Lang Fund represents one of the oldest continuously operating student-managed portfolios in graduate business education. Its architecture — an endowed educational vehicle that converts student investment labor into scholarship capital — predates and differs from the opt-in student investment clubs common at peer schools. The fund's governance sits with the business school faculty, not the university investment office, which keeps it insulated from the broader endowment's asset-allocation decisions and manager-selection processes.