Is it possible that some of these big donations are given with intention to secure seats for applicants who can’t meet basic admission requirements on their own, even with legacy card?
Harvard has ‘development admits’ and it is usually assumed those came about because of a big gift.
We make annual gifts to all of the colleges that we and our children attended. Wisconsin, Reed, Chicago, RISD. We also give money to support particular projects or efforts of the universities where I have taught. It’s not a lot of money but we truly feel a connection to those institutions. My undergraduate alma mater tries to get old grads like me to pledge $1,911 each year – 1911 is the year of the college’s founding. But I won’t make such a pledge!
I pay full tuition etc. for my kid. I feel if I am ever going to give to colleges — and I vaguely plan to donate before or after I die — it will be to my alma mater undergraduate and graduate schools which gave me financial aid and financial scholarships to help me make money so I can send my kid to college for full pay. And I plan to put a specific condition that my donation be used to help kids from poor families who are getting grades below B average, just like I did. Lol
I am glad that my kid is going to this rich high ranked college and all because he wanted to go there, but he could have gone to several good colleges basically for free.
Honestly, I probably would have given some money had my kid received either scholarship or financial aid.
I prefer to give to real charities.
Most of my donations go to animal shelters, to creatures who can’t help themselves, or to DD’s high school.
I was full pay at my college, so the urge to “give back” is directed at my parents more so than my alma mater.
My favorite charity right now is my daughter’s college fund, though.
We donate to our schools, colleges and different charities.
Our children’s colleges have to wait until kids become gainfully employed. They aren’t getting any financial aid so there is no obligation for us or them to donate but if they want to give, it’s up to them.
I do donate to their public school’s programs generously as due to Robinhood system in Texas, our schools have to send big chunk of district’s income to poor districts. If it weren’t for family donations, our district’s children wouldn’t have fine arts programs or extracurriculars.
I suppose because we support the institutions who helped make us who we are? That includes both cash-strapped state and wealthy private universities, churches we no longer attend, preschools/K-12s, and some non-profits for which we’ve volunteered.
We also give money to non-profits that need financial support.
We do not donate much to any cause- $20 here or there. We need to pay our son’s college tuition, so all our marriage we have been saving for him and never spent much money on cars, clothes, vacations, charities, etc.
My $20 donations used to go to charities for diseases, not colleges— and I used to respond to college solicitation calls with ‘no way, lose my number’— until I learned on College Confidential that there is such a thing as legacy admissions. For the next three years, my college and my spouse’s college got up to $100 each, and we contributed some of our time as well. I doubt that small amount of money made a difference, but if anyone in admissions were to look into whether we were active alumni, we wanted the answer to be yes.
My kid is the cause I care most about. If he continues to be happy at college, I will keep posting its praises on CC and maybe attend local college fairs for them and so on. And my spouse is still willing to do interviews for his alma mater, even though our son is going to mine. But money? $20 annually to keep the US News figure for percentage of alumni donating that contributes to the data that keeps them at #1, yes… but the rest of our money is not even enough to pay for our own kid’s law school or whatever, so the college will have to make do with the $70,000 we are paying for tuition and room and board!
But now that I understand how financial aid works and how crazily generous our alma maters are to poor kids… well, I don’t think that is necessarily a less noble cause to which to donate than is fighting cancer or AIDS… for those who have the money to spare, which is not us! Why shouldn’t a smart, hardworking kid with parents who can’t afford full tuition at my alma mater not be able to benefit from alumni donations and get the same education I want my own kid to have? College can transform lives. And at the top colleges, some of the kids whose lives are transformed will go on to make decisions that affect the rest of the world. So yes, providing opportunities for kids at the nation’s top colleges is a great use of one’s money, if one believes in the transformative nature of a good education and has the cash to spare!
I wouldn’t give to any organization I felt would not make best use of the funds. Nor one without clear goals or where a high % of the money goes to admin costs.
So now we’re talking mega donors? What makes you certain they don’t support numerous causes?
I mentioned upthread that I went to grad school at a very wealthy college. While I was there, I got to know an undergrad, and later we reconnected via mutual acquaintances, and she’s become a good family friend.
Her response when she gets fundraising calls, asking her to make an alumna donation? “I’ll start donating once my student loans are paid off.” (She had some severe health issues after graduation, and that forced her into bankruptcy at one point—but remember, student loan debt isn’t dischargeable, so she’s got a long road of student loan repayments still to go.)
She says that usually stops the pitch cold.
Some endowments are very large, but they’re not big enough to pay all the bills. Harvard’s is the biggest at $37 billion, but using a standard 5% annual payout from endowment, that was enough to support only a little over 1/3 of Harvard’s $5 billion annual operating budget in 2017. At most schools the endowment payout is much less both in absolute dollar terms and as a fraction of the overall budget. And it would be irresponsible to “eat the seed corn” by paying out a larger percentage of the endowment in any given year.
Also, the endowment isn’t just a giant slush fund that the university can use any way it likes. Most endowment funds are restricted to particular schools within the university, or to particular uses like financial aid or endowed faculty chairs. Harvard’s $37 billion endowment includes a Medical School endowment of $4 billion, Business School $3.5 billion, Law School $1.9 billion, and so on. That makes endowment support highly variable by school: at the high end, Harvard’s Divinity School gets nearly 3/4 of its operating budget from endowment payout, while at the low end, the School of Public Health gets only 16% of its operating budget from endowment.
Nor do all contributions go to endowment. Colleges and universities also maintain annual giving programs to support current operating expenses. My undergraduate alma mater, the University of Michigan, has an endowment just shy of $11 billion, making it the 6th largest among all colleges and universities. But in most years the university receives about as much in its annual giving program as in new contributions to endowment. I’m no mega-donor, but I gladly give a few hundred dollars to the annual giving programs of all my undergraduate and graduate school almae matres because I know they count on my gifts along with those of thousands of other alums to keep the lights on, the faculty fed, and the students well served as I was in my day.
If my kids ever get rich, I will expect them to pay back their high school and colleges for their education, with interest. They have been the beneficiaries of other people who loved their schools and were able to donate large sums to make the schools even better.
For a bit of perspective:
Endowment figures from “The 100 Richest Universities in America”:
-
Harvard $36 Billion
-
Yale $27.1 Billion
-
University of Texas System $26.5 B
4)Stanford $24.7 B -
Princeton $23.8 B
-
MIT $14.96 B
-
UPenn $12.2 B
-
Texas A&M System $11.55 B
-
Michigan $10.9 B
-
Northwestern $10.456 B
-
Columbia $9.99 B
-
UC System $9.78 B
-
Notre Dame $9.35 B
-
Duke $7.9 B
-
WashUStL $7.86 B
-
Chicago $7.5 B
-
Emory $6.9 B
-
Cornell $6.757 B
-
Virginia $6.39 B
-
Rice $5.8 B
-
USC $5.1 B
-
Dartmouth College $4.95 B
-
Ohio State $4.25 B
-
Vanderbilt $4.13 B
-
NYU $3.99 B
-
Penn State $3.99 B
-
Univ. of Pittsburgh $3.954 B
-
Johns Hopkins $3.844
-
Minnesota $3.49 B
-
Brown $3.245
-
UNC $3.027 B
-
Wisconsin $2.746 B
-
Michigan State $2.68 B
Why do I have an urge to donate to Columbia, NYU & Penn State ?
Tip that scale, @Publisher ! 
We aren’t donating to our sons’ colleges. BTDT via tuition. They both donate to them, but not in large amounts. They are both more generous with causes and non-profits that are important to them.
DH and I donate to the programs at the high schools where our sons attended. They are constantly battling budget cuts while being asked to do more. Frankly, the HS programs were more important to S1 & S2’s development than the colleges they attended.
You have to look at the size of student body to put size of endowment in perspective. If a huge college with 40,000 students has a $10 billion endowment, are students really better off than a small college of 2,000 with a $2 billion endowment?
Also consider how is it all sliced? If graduate and professional schools have bigger chunks and more expenses than undergraduate may not see as many benefits as at a school where they are the apple of the eye.
Sounds pretty judgmental to me.
^If by judgemental you mean critical of parents that complain about the costs of college as if it snuck up on them out of nowhere, I am guilty.
If you are talking about criticizing people who say the system is unfair because as middle class parents they have to contribute to their kids education while poor kids get free rides, once again guilty.
If being judgemental is disagreeing with parents that blame first gen, URM, and disadvantaged kids for their own kids “unfair” failure to get into schools of their choice, yep guilty.
Grown ups have the responsibility to prepare and save for their kids education. Not easy for sure and sometimes impossible and I have total respect for those that struggle to do so. No judgement at all for those whom it proves impossible. You have my respect, empathy and support. Complainers different story.
I take issue when people scapegoat, display self pity, and claim themselves as victims in a system that largely works and provides safety nets yet demands preparation and self sacrifice from all that participate.
Thanks for reading my initial reply but by only excerpting you took it out of context. I hope this helps clarify.
I donate to my children’s colleges. For financially struggling public universities, it’s government’s and tax payers’ obligation.