<p>These kinds of comparisons would be more meaningful only if you broke down alumni giving by class, and showed class giving over a period of years—which of course no one’s going to do because it’s too much to chart. For many publics, alumni giving was never considered a major component of the school’s finances until quite recently—the school, the alums, and the state just thought it was the state’s job to support the school, not the alumni’s. The top publics have been gradually making a transition away from that model, but depending on the school they may have tens or hundreds of thousands of older alums who have never bought into the new fiscal reality of public higher education, and who bring down both the % of alumni giving and the per capita average. Most private schools, by contrast, start pounding alums for contributions even before they’re alums, i.e., before they graduate; and they’ve been doing this for generations. </p>
<p>I also agree with interesteddad: capital campaigns will deeply skew single-year numbers in favor of those schools that happen to have a major capital campaign underway during the year in question. That’s enough “noise” to drown out any meaningful information in the data. This exercise is pretty much worthless.</p>