<p>^$20 is less than it costs them to send all those solicitations and alumni mags and to make the phone calls and keep their alumni database up-to-date.</p>
<p>Private colleges start soliciting the parents while the kids are still in college. Shortly after I send in my D1’s $48,000 tuition payment I get a warm letter from the college president explaining how much they rely on contributions from alumni, parents, and “friends of the college” and reminding me that what I just paid represents only a fraction of what it costs to educate may daughter. They hit newly minted graduates with that message before they can take their mortarboard off, and they keep pestering them until they can get something, anything, out of them, partly so they can list them in the percentage of “satisfied” alums who give back, but also because it’s well known in the fundraising racket that charitable giving is habitual and once you start giving, you’re likely to continue giving, and your contributions will tend to grow with your income, so it’s a net gain even if the first few years are a loss leader with that $20 contribution not paying for the costs of all the pestering.</p>
<p>I don’t think alumni giving has much to do with satisfaction. It’s a pretty heavy guilt message most of them use: “Others paid for you, now it’s your turn to give back.” That, or a veiled threat: “You wouldn’t want to see this place fall apart and have your degree decline in perceived value because of it, would you? So pay up!” They’re a little more subtle about it, but those are the underlying messages. It’s never, “Oh, remember your own happy, golden days at Elite Fancy-Pants College; wouldn’t you like to help someone else’s child live that same dream?” Because they know a fair percentage of their alums were miserable in college, for at least parts of it, and they don’t want to let them use that as an excuse not to pay up. And because they know a lot of their alums don’t give a rip about someone else’s kid. This is just something between the college and you, and it’s put as a straight value proposition: “We, the college, know it cost more than you paid to get you your degree; you got more than you paid for, so so you still owe us.” </p>
<p>It’s different at public universities. Many of them never systematically tried to wring money out of their alums in the past, except for big donors. And there’s still an underlying attitude in many states that paying for public higher education is the taxpayers’ responsibility, not the family’s and not the alum’s, and there’s often a lingering resentment that the cost was so high when the family feels it had already paid through taxation (often vastly overestimating how much of their tax dollar has ever gone into public higher education). So it’s just a harder sell from the outset, not only because the machinery hasn’t been in place as long and the tradition of giving isn’t as ingrained, but because giving to a private college or university feels like giving to a charity (or simply paying back on what the charity gave you, which is how they prefer you to think about it) while giving to a public university feels to many people like being asked to pay a voluntary additional tax because the rest of the taxpaying public is too cheap to pay the bills. It’s just comparing apples and oranges.</p>