An analysis of Carleton College’s financial and economic strategy throughout history. We want to examine Carleton’s financial behavior with an emphasis on the historical context during the time of their fiscal decision making. We have looked into accessing information regarding Carleton’s largest public equity holdings each year and into how far in the past we have that information. We are also finding information about their endowment allocation in general ideally data on asset allocation and policy portfolio.

After speaking with Tom Lamb, we will start with data from annual Treasurer’s Reports going back to 1867 through 2004. Many (most?) of these up until 1990 detail the College’s investments and endowment. We have these reports from 1990-2004 as well, but the detail is less fine. For information we cannot find in these reports, we will speak to Fred Rogers, Carleton’s Vice President and Treasurer (https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/treasurer/). He suggested that we contact his Office, and they will see what they can provide us with.

We are unsure of how we will store the data right now, we will take a look at the data that we can get a hold of and the different data jquery visualization tools out there and then make a call on how to store the data. Right now our options are either a SQL database, a google spreadsheet, a JSON file, and CSV files. Depending on the tool we choose we will need to organize the data differently, right now we are looking at a few visualizers and want the final product to focus on the investment portfolio. We are also considering looking at where money is being spent on campus, ie. percentage of endowment spent on dorm renovations/ financial aid, or alumni donations over time, all interesting questions relating to Carleton’s finances. We want to look for times Carleton made mistakes and other times when Carleton made a good decision. We would also like to compare our investment strategy with similar institutions.

http://www.tableau.com/public/gallery

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-to-invest-like-harvard-and-yale-2013-10-15

Our next step is going to be looking at the annual treasurer’s reports after setting up a meeting with Fred Rogers. After that depending on the data we get, we will either take a field trip to Carleton’s Investment Office in downtown Minneapolis to ask for more data. If we have enough then we will start the data entry process and search for more visualization tools. Finally we will begin work on the actual web app after securing a domain name and choosing a tool. Throughout the final process we will be looking for contextual evidence that adds to the story like treasurers notes or events at the institution such as student protests of investments.

Right now the final product is kind of amorphous, changing based on what we have access to. The goal of this project is to make data more accessible and informative so that it can be used for research and help put Carleton’s historical financial strategy in context. We would like a combination of text and a line graph that is interactive. Ideally there will be filters that allow users to choose which investments or categories of investments to compare. Looking past this class this project could grow into a comparison of all of the small liberal arts investment portfolios in history that would shed a light on the differences and similarities of “the college” and it’s fiscal strategy over time.