"… Given widespread concerns about the cost of higher education, it may be surprising to learn that college and university alumni often voluntarily donate cash to their alma maters. In fact, the amount of money that alumni are giving to their schools is on the rise.
Alumni contributions to U.S. colleges and universities increased by 6.9% between fiscal year 2017 and fiscal year 2018, climbing to a grand total of $12.15 billion, according to a 2019 report from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. The uptick in alumni giving is even more profound when viewing historical trends. Within the 30 years between 1988 and 2018, alumni gifts increased by 495%, the CASE report shows." …
Me either, for two reasons. I donate regularly to my alma mater and I went to an LAC. There’s something about that small, tight-knit experience that, for some, deepens the connection.
The other reason is purely statistical - with fewer people, it’s easier to get larger percentages. If you have 20,000 living alumnae (like my small LAC) and 8,000 of them give, that’s 40%. If you have 500,000 living alumni, even if 100,000 of them give, that’s only 20%.
^Well, it’s not only that, but research universities have so many moving parts to them - and, divided loyalties. Are Wharton alum really going to give to a general fund campaign chiefly benefiting the College of Arts & Sciences? Or, the engineering school? Also, I’m pretty sure these surveys count graduate students as part of the alumni base. Ever try cold calling a newly minted PhD for money? Not pretty.
We also did as @homerdog when we created our list of criteria for college searching. We weren’t interested in large research universities where undergrads aren’t the central focus of the college mission. Just by alumni donation itself doesn’t necessarily say much about the college; it’s also their involvement. When these combined alumni activities are high, that’s a good sign that their undergrad experience was also good. So combining the level of alumni donation and involvement became a part of the criteria along with other factors, such as: endowment per student, teacher-to-student ratio, undergrad vs. grad population, size of each class, pedagogical system (faculty taught vs. grad/TA taught and tutorial system, if any, such as Oxford Tutorial at Williams, Preceptorial at Princeton, etc.), and so on. It was then only natural that we had several LACs on our list.