Saying he believes there is a “pretty high correlation” between the size of U.S. college endowments and the riskiness of their financial strategies, Tufts University’s president, Lawrence Bacow, told Bloomberg that higher education institutions should abandon their stakes in alternative investments such as hedge funds and private equity.

Such risky investments sent assets at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and other well-endowed institutions plummeting in the past year, leading to disruptive cost cuts at schools where endowments covered as much as 49 percent of operating budgets.

Mr. Bacow said Tufts’s endowment, which lost 26 percent of its value in the year ending June 30, will contribute only 10 percent of the schools operating costs this year and that there “are investments we will not make” in the wake of the financial crisis.