<p>Phuriku:</p>
<p>Thanks for the post. You and Divine Comedy are certainly right that total fundraising dollars shouldn’t matter when you consider the size and scope of a particular school. So, for example, Caltech has a very narrow scope and is a pretty small school (about 2100 students and 300 professors). Similarly, Princeton has no professional graduate programs and has a small graduate research community (about 7500 students and 1100 professors total).</p>
<p>Neither Princeton nor Caltech (or MIT, for that matter) purport to be major, comprehensive research institutions. The scope of these schools is more limited, and, while they excel in certain areas of research, they are not expansive research universities by any means, and being major, comprehensive research institutions is not part of any of these schools’ missions.</p>
<p>In this light, the fundraising capabilities of these schools are quite impressive, given their size, scope, and mission. Caltech generates $150M a year, Princeton about $240M, and MIT about $530M.</p>
<p>In contrast to these schools, UChicago openly purports to be a major, comprehensive research school. Unlike these other schools, UChicago has a significant medical center, a wide array of professional graduate programs, and a significantly larger physical footprint (with about 15k student and 2k professors). </p>
<p>In this vein, UChicago more closely resembles other major, comprehensive research institutions such as Stanford, Duke, and Yale, than it does Cal Tech, MIT, and Princeton. Moreover, if you look at the size of the schools and the expansiveness and ambition of their research programs, UChicago again resembles schools such as Stanford, Duke, and Yale more than Caltech or MIT.</p>
<p>It’s through this lens that UChicago’s more paltry fundraising proves to be worrisome. Yale, Stanford, Duke etc. are roughly similar in size (with Yale being a bit smaller and Stanford being a touch larger, perhaps), and they have very similar institutional missions - to advance research across many fields at the highest level. Nevertheless, these other schools - schools that mirror UChicago more closely than MIT or CalTech, generate a great deal more fundraising dollars each year. </p>
<p>As fundraising is the lifeblood of major research endeavors, and as Duke, Stanford, etc. have similar missions and are of very similar size to UChicago, this disparity, to me, is worrying. I identify this as a problem area for UChicago, given its size, scope, goals, and academic mission. </p>
<p>(In fact, it’s curious to me that the major midwestern research universities trail their peers on the coasts so significantly. UChicago, Northwestern, and WashU all have a roughly similar size, scope, and mission to Yale, Stanford, etc., but the big 3 midwestern schools lag in total fundraising. This is a conversation for another time. Of course, as a UChicago alum, I’m more concerned with UChicago than NU and Wash U.)</p>