“They’re not cheating. They’re not hiding money or disguising money,” said Samuel Brunson, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago who has studied endowment taxation. “But they’re adding money to a system that allows people, if they want to hide their money, to do it.” Not only do the universities benefit — so does the wealthy and influential private equity industry.

Perhaps illustrating the sensitivity of the topic, officials at most of the college and university endowments that use blocker corporations, including Colgate, Dartmouth, Duke and Stanford, declined to comment specifically, citing longstanding policies against discussing their investments. Among them was Matt Kavgian, the director of strategic communications for Indiana University’s $2 billion endowment, which had invested $10 million with Quintana.

An exception was the Quintana shareholder Texas Christian University, whose chief investment officer, Jim Hille, acknowledged that the $1.5 billion endowment had used blocker corporations. Mr. Hille said the decision to use one often came down to whether the expected return would offset the cost of establishing a blocker corporation.

References to such corporations in the Appleby files, shared with The New York Times by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which obtained them from the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, date back at least to 2003. At that time, five elite schools — Columbia University, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University — became partners in a Bermuda-based group called H&F Investors Blocker.

H&F Investors Blocker was formed to invest with one of the largest private equity firms, Hellman & Friedman, in shares of Axel Springer, a German publisher of newspapers and magazines.

Minutes from meetings at Appleby’s office in Hamilton, Bermuda, never mention tax avoidance or even explain why the word “blocker” is used in the partnership’s title. But an audit by Ernst & Young, contained in the minutes, shows that H&F Investors Blocker would owe no federal income tax.

By 2008, the University of Texas system — whose endowment last year was $24.2 billion, behind Harvard’s ($34.5 billion) and Yale’s ($25.4 billion) — asked Appleby to set up a Cayman Islands company called TX Liquidity Capital so “certain tax advantages will accrue to the system,” documents show.