And at small and large universities alike I’m troubled by the lack of transparency about fees. How does a donor, dean or trustee know whether investment fees are reasonable and proper if they don’t know what the fees are?

Even the university officers who oversee the endowment often have no earthly idea how much they pay in fees. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the huge pension fund known as Calpers, is not the only organization stumbling around in the dark. The mind-set of limited partners, unfortunately, is to focus only on asset allocation and cash-on-cash return. But that’s like saying retail investors shouldn’t care about hidden mutual fund fees.

Tax forms provide little useful information under current law. Nonprofit universities file a tax return known as a Form 990, and buried in the form is a line that asks the university to report how much the endowment paid in investment management fees.

But universities vary wildly in the amount of investment fees reported and even where they are reported on the return. Some seem to interpret the form as a request for information on out-of-pocket expenses, which are relatively low. Others exclude information that a rational investor would consider material, like the annual management fees paid by the investment funds in which the university invests. I’m not aware of any universities that consider carried interest a fee or investment expense, even though their counterparties (the investment management firms like the Blackstone Group, the Carlyle Group and Apollo Global Management) obviously count carried interest as income on their books.

Nor do universities disclose what investments the endowment holds, even at the fund level. Because most investments are made through university-owned holding companies in the Cayman Islands, Delaware or Nevada, the ultimate investment is often obscured.