Prosperous alumni helped make 2006 a record fundraising year for colleges and universities, which hauled in an all-time high of $28 billion – a 9.4 percent jump from the year before.
There were increases across the board, but as usual it was the already wealthy that fared best. Stanford’s $911 million was the most ever collected by a single university and raised the staggering possibility of a billion-dollar fundraising year in the not-too- distant future.
Nationally, donations from alumni rose 18.3 percent from 2005, according to new figures released Wednesday by the Council for Aid to Education. Alumni donations account for about 30 percent of giving to higher education. Giving from other groups, such as corporations and foundations, increased by much smaller amounts.
Survey director Ann Kaplan said the strong economy played a role, but universities also were asking more aggressively as part of formal fundraising campaigns.
Stanford had about 300 full- time fundraising employees asking for money in 2006.
The CAE survey contains good news for a number of schools with small endowments that saw large percentage jumps, such as Wagner College in New York and the University of La Verne in California – both of which raised about $10 million and more than doubled 2005’s collections.
But in absolute dollars, the wealthiest institutions still dominate – and are expanding their lead. Last year, the top 10 fundraising universities collected 16.3 percent of all gifts, or $7.2 billion, compared with 14.7 percent in 2005. The top 20 institutions accounted for more than a quarter of all fundraising.
Stanford was followed by Harvard, which raised $595 million, then Yale ($433 million) and the University of Pennsylvania ($409 million). All of the biggest fundraising schools are large research institutions with medical schools that typically attract private support for research from well beyond their alumni base.
Rounding out the top 10 were Cornell, Southern California, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Duke and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which was the top fundraiser among public universities, raising $326 million.
