Saint Mary's College

Saint Mary's College

Saint Mary's College is a private Catholic women's liberal arts college in Notre Dame, Indiana, sponsored since its 1844 founding by the Sisters of the Holy Cross. The college educates roughly 1,600 students and maintains a campus whose physical plant includes Bertrand Hall, the Angela Athletic & Wellness Complex, the Cushwa-Leighton Library, and Lake Marian. The Sisters of the Holy Cross remain the sponsoring congregation and a major real estate partner. The endowment invests alongside the University of Notre Dame, which manages the pool. Confirmed asset-class exposure spans private equity, mezzanine, distressed debt, and natural resources, executed through a fund-of-funds structure. The college participates in the NACUBO annual endowment study, benchmarking against peer independent colleges. Geographic focus is North America. Philanthropic gifts — such as a $10M donation from trustees Clayton and MaryAnn Mathile for the Science Hall renovation — feed both the physical campus and the long-term portfolio. Team size and internal investment staff are not publicly disclosed; governance sits with The Corporation of Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame. The college belongs to NAICU and the ACCU. Jennifer Mathile Prikkel, a trustee and major donor, represents the Mathile family's ongoing philanthropic engagement with the institution. The relationship with Notre Dame extends beyond investment management to dual-degree programs and a co-exchange partnership, embedding the college in a larger academic and financial ecosystem. Saint Mary's structural differentiator is its pooled-endowment model with a larger, neighboring research university — placing a women's college inside the investment governance and manager-access pipeline of a multi-billion-dollar endowment. That architecture, combined with its status as a Catholic institution operating under USCCB tax-exempt structures, shapes a conservative, fund-of-funds posture distinct from independent small-college endowments that self-manage or outsource to an OCIO.