There are several great things you can learn about from your friends: hot new bands, hot new freshmen, almost anything really. Perhaps, however, colleges ought not have been so keen on acting like lemmings and treating Yale like the cool, pretty cheerleader in high school, because now they’re suffering. Back in the day, Yale was all over the alternative investments. Now schools like UVA, Columbia, and Duke are realizing that their assets have plummeted in value.

The New York Times reports:

Some of the nation’s universities are trying to sell chunks of their portfolios privately as their endowments swoon with the markets.

Among institutional investors, school endowments aggressively embraced private equity, real estate partnerships, venture capital, commodities, hedge funds and other so-called alternative investments over the last few years. Endowments with more than $1 billion in assets reported 35 percent of their holdings in these types of investments on average last year, a much greater portion than big public pension funds, for example.

Now they are balking. The value of some of these investments has fallen, and they are not easily shed because there is no public market for them, as there is for stocks. Worse, private equity and venture capital funds require investors to put up additional capital over time…

The stampede into alternative investments was fed by a desire to imitate the Yale Model, an investment strategy developed by David F. Swensen, who diversified Yale’s endowment portfolio beyond stocks and bonds into hedge funds, private equity, real estate and commodities.

David A. Salem, who manages the Investment Fund for Foundations, says few managers can match the skills of a Yale or Harvard endowment and many overpaid for those assets.

So if it makes you feel any better about being very much financially screwed right now, just remember that universities filled with the smartest of the smarty pants in the country, also have fallen prey to bad investments.