Donations to the nation’s colleges dropped slightly last year, after inflation is taken into account, the Council for Aid to Education reported last week.
Colleges raised $28-billion, a decline of 0.6 percent, the council said. That is about the same amount as institutions raised in 2006.
While that finding is probably a sobering one for institutions whose expenses and ambitions have grown since then, college fund raisers can take solace in the fact that donations did not decline further.
Giving in 2009 fell 11.9-percent, the steepest in the survey’s 50-year history.
Ann E. Kaplan, the survey’s director, said the findings reflected the economy’s sluggish recovery. “Giving isn’t going to get there until circumstances get there,” she said.
Fewer Alumni Donors
The survey, which counts cash gifts to colleges and included about 1,000 institutions, found that the percentage of alumni who give continued to decline, dropping to a record low of 9.8 percent.
The size of the average alumni gift also dropped.
Colleges continue to monitor the alumni-giving rate. The rate—the percentage of undergraduate alumni who give to an institution—is significant because alumni gifts make up a quarter of all giving to higher education (only foundations, which represent 30 percent of donations, are a larger segment).
Optimism for 2011
Some philanthropy experts see the lackluster results as a lingering effect from the recession, when donors were too nervous to make big commitments and colleges hesitated to ask. As a result, the pipeline of major gifts, which typically take years to cultivate and close, dried up and is just now starting to refill.
“The Great Recession lasted a lot longer than anybody thought,” said Bruce Flessner, a fund-raising consultant at Bentz Whaley Flessner. “It wasn’t just a few down quarters. I suspect in 2011 we’ll see more big gifts return.”
About half of the survey’s respondents probably share Mr. Flessner’s optimism. Almost 52 percent of institutions reported that their giving went up in 2010.
Stanford Raises the Most
The top three fund-raising institutions in the 2010 fiscal year were Stanford University ($598.9-million), Harvard University ($597-million), and the Johns Hopkins University ($427.6-million). All three raised less in 2010 than the year before.
Duke University, whose private support went up 14.5 percent to $345.5-million last year, saw a slight increase in its number of donors but attributes its success more to the return of confidence among its supporters, said Michael J. Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations. In 2010, Duke, which had the fourth-largest increase among the top-20 institutions, was ninth in amount of money raised.
“People who a year ago were reluctant to make commitments even for the next year had a much better feeling about the economy in general and their personal circumstances,” Mr. Schoenfeld said.
The University of Southern California showed similar growth, increasing its donations 15.5 percent to $426-million, earning the institution the No. 4 spot.
The university is doing even better this fiscal year, thanks to two $50-million gifts it announced in October.
Albert R. Checcio, senior vice president for university advancement, said the recent big gifts are early lead gifts for a fund-raising campaign the university is planning to announce this fall.
The university’s pool of donors—and Southern California’s industries—is more economically diverse than that of many East Coast institutions, which depend more heavily on Wall Street money, said Mr. Checcio, who was the head of fund raising at Fordham University in New York before moving to Los Angeles in August.
Decline in Giving
But many of the leading fund raisers fared worse in 2010 than the year before.
Out of the top 20 institutions—which represent 25.5 percent of all gifts to higher education—13 raised less money in 2010, including the University of Washington, Cornell University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Cornell, which was a bright spot in last year’s survey because it increased its donations during the recession by asking for early pledge payoffs and other types of gifts, was down 31 percent, to about $308.2-million.
The full survey report can be ordered through the Council for Aid to Education’s Web site at http://www.cae.org.
