“If you’re going to invest internally, you want to make sure you have the best investors you can get. You’re competing in their business not yours,” Eve Guernsey, J.P. MorganChase’s managing director of institutional investing, said last year.

Because of its size, Harvard can afford to pay its money managers competitive industry salaries, a critical element to maintaining the best managers, according to Meyer.

University President Lawrence H. Summers also justified the money managers’ high compensation.

“The pay reflected in performance relative to indices,” Summers said. “In fact, the University is able, by using in-house managers, to achieve superior returns at a far lower cost than it could if it paid a financial management company which then paid external managers.”

Because HMC is a nonprofit subsidiary of Harvard, it must report the compensations of its five highest-earning employees, while nonprofit institutions that use outside investment managers are not required to report this information.

HMC is not required to release the compensation figures until next year, but traditionally publishes the numbers soon after releasing its performance figures in the fall.

“This is difficult from a p.r. standpoint because these are some large numbers,” Meyer said. “Our numbers tend to stand out, even though we know that the total cost to Harvard is less than it would have been if we used external managers.”

—Staff writer Jenifer L. Steinhardt can be reached at steinhar@fas.harvard.edu.