An analyst working for a large investment firm is evaluating the performance of various investment funds as part of a report to the firm's portfolio managers. One component of the evaluation is the assessment of the statistical moments of the entire population of fund returns. Since the analyst has access to a very large dataset of historical returns, the analyst decides to estimate sample moments such as the sample mean return, sample variance, and sample skewness using a smaller subset of historical returns data. Which of the following would be correct for the analyst to conclude about the sample variance?