FIN 411 class collaborates with KU Endowment to support investment strategy

During the fall 2025 semester, students enrolled in Felix Meschke’s FIN 411 Investment Theory and Applications honors class presented investment recommendations to their client, KU Endowment’s, capping off a semester of applied learning. 

Meschke, associate professor of finance, asked his students a question to guide their project: “The market is highly valued, and KU Endowment has almost all its money in the market. Do you think that’s a good idea?”  

Students were tasked with presenting recommendations to their client in the form of a report and a slideshow presentation, culminating in a back-and forth conversation with KU Endowment and other present audience members.  

“It’s a very unstructured assignment, but it’s a very realistic assignment,” Meschke, associate professor of finance, said. “What makes my case challenging is that students have to take something as simple as three sentences and turn it into an actual investigation that generates insights. Then, they have to defend those points to their client. It’s not a passive presentation where someone sits there with a rubric; there are frequent interruptions by audience members” 

KU Endowment, a frequent class client, is a nonprofit foundation that serves as KU’s official fundraising and asset management organization for KU, supporting facilities, scholarships and select campus construction projects. According to James Clarke, KU Endowment’s chief investment officer, Endowment is involved in about two-thirds of the buildings on campus and supports about 14% of the Lawrence campus budget. 

Because most of KU Endowment’s money was invested in equities and equity-like assets during the time of the project, Meschke asked his students to assess whether that equity exposure remained appropriate given very elevated market valuations and to make any suggested adjustments. Students investigated if current enthusiasm for artificial intelligence would create a bubble and if KU Endowment should reallocate their portfolio.  

“With the market conditions right now, everything is a little shaky with AI,” senior Hailey Bingham, a FIN 411 student during the project, said. “Before this project, we did an entirely different project in the class investigating if there really is an AI bubble. That helped us have a good background on the topic, and it allowed us to tell KU Endowment what we found in that project as we moved into the next project.”  

Meschke’s class is structured to prepare students for the project months in advance through smaller presentations and projects throughout the semester. This lead-up is providing feedback on students’ presentation and analytical skills while reinforcing essential investment concepts. 

“To some extent, the project is semester long, even though they only get a month to work with the question itself,” Meschke said. “But they’ve been practicing presenting and analyzing cases throughout the semester. We go through the building blocks that any professional investor needs to understand.” 

Students like sophomore Jayden Good found this lead-up to the project helpful. 

“We did four group-based projects before the final presentation,” Good said. “It was super beneficial to learn how to do everything beforehand. We learned about regressions, portfolio allocations and how to use Excel for different statistical analyses. This was one of the most challenging classes I’ve taken, so I learned a lot of critical thinking skills throughout that.” 

The final presentation had two to three members per group, meaning students were working closely with one another consistently. Junior Ryo Higuchi, another student during last semester’s class, found the collaboration essential to completing the project in a realistic manner. They collaborated by assigning tasks and deadlines to one another, holding each other accountable for their work. 

Good cited the amount of dedication required to succeed as one of his favorite things about the class. He suggests prospective students of the class prepare for some intense work. 

“I loved the class to death,” Good said. “I love markets and the research aspect, and it was basically just a class where we talked about markets and investment the entire time. That’s my bread and butter. It’s a very dense and ambiguous class. If you’re taking the class, you have to ask a ton of questions because the projects are incredibly ambiguous. Go in with the skills you have but understand conceptually how the market works beforehand.” 

Good also said that audience members “hammered questions” during the presentation, frequently playing devil’s advocate and asking a variety of “what-if” questions, which Meschke and Clarke both said was to simulate a real-world meeting.  

“The ‘what-if’ questions stress-test a recommendation,” Clarke said. “Markets rarely behave exactly as expected, so good investors think through multiple possible outcomes. ... The goal [when asking questions] is to understand how carefully the students have thought about their recommendation. A strong proposal shows awareness of risks, tradeoffs and implementation, not just pretty slides.” 

The goal for Endowment wasn’t to get one answer on what to do, but rather to hear from different perspectives based on the students’ research and to practice a real-world scenario with students. In the end, KU Endowment took each group’s advice into consideration and continued to work on their portfolio daily. 

“The goal of the exercise isn’t finding a single correct answer, but to understand how different scenarios might affect a long-term portfolio,” Clarke said. “Many students we meet are on strong paths toward careers in finance. More importantly, they’re developing the habits that matter most: curiosity, disciplined thinking and the willingness to question their assumptions. As a KU alum, it’s rewarding to see the quality of students coming out of the business school.”