Small universities’ endowments did significantly better in the just-ended fiscal year than their larger, higher-profile peers, which plunged more deeply into alternative investments such as hedge funds, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The five largest single-university endowments — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — expect to finish the year with 25- to 30-percent losses. The median decline in the first 11 months of fiscal 2009 was 20 percent, and endowments with less than $100-million in assets lost 16 percent, on average.

“A lesson from this crisis is that following what the larger guys have done is not necessarily a road map to success,” said Daniel Jick, head of HighVista Strategies, in Boston, which manages endowment money for small academic institutions.

To learn more about how all types of nonprofit endowments are faring, see the Chronicle’s annual endowment study.