University of San Diego Endowment

The Investment Committee, chaired by Leandro A. Festino, a Senior Consultant at Meketa Investment Group, oversees asset allocation and manager selection. The committee operates within a multi-manager framework where Meketa serves as the primary outsourced chief investment officer. CFO Katy Roig handles financial operations, while board treasurer Robert R. Dean provides additional oversight.

The endowment relies on Meketa Investment Group's outsourced-CIO model rather than a fully internal team. Because the committee's chair is a Meketa senior consultant, manager diligence flows through Meketa's institutional platform rather than through proprietary sourcing networks. This provides scaled access to fund-of-funds, direct co-investments, and niche strategies across venture, buyout, and real assets.

It is structured as a traditional charitable endowment supporting the university's operating budget. However, its governance shares traits with a foundation: named benefactors like Darlene Marcos Shiley and Don Knauss maintain close donor relationships, and the board's Investment Committee integrates their legacy priorities. The pool's recent commitment to Catholic social teaching through fossil-fuel divestment further blurs the line between endowment and mission-aligned foundation.

Manager allocations span the full lifecycle — seed and early-stage venture, expansion/late-stage, growth equity, buyout, mezzanine, and distressed/turnaround situations. On the real-assets side, the committee invests in natural resources, timber, and secondaries, while its on-campus real estate portfolio includes residential and mixed-use properties like Manchester Village.

The endowment directly holds physical campus-adjacent properties including Alcalá Park, Manchester Village, and University Terrace Apartments. These are held separately from the marketable real assets portfolio, which relies on external managers for natural resources, timber, and other real-asset strategies. The art collection — anchored by the Hoehn Family Print Collection — is also treated as a tangible asset class under the committee's purview.

In 2024, the University of San Diego formally committed to full fossil-fuel divestment and joined the Intentional Endowments Network. The decision was explicitly framed as an implementation of the Vatican's Laudato Si' ecological encyclical. That same year, the university earned a Platinum rating from AASHE STARS for sustainability in higher education, reinforcing the divestment mandate with operational rigor.

The multi-manager portfolio includes direct co-investments as well as traditional fund commitments, fund-of-funds allocations, and secondaries. The outsourced-CIO arrangement with Meketa means co-investment opportunities are typically evaluated within Meketa's broader client platform rather than through a standalone direct-investment team at the university.