Giving to colleges and universities fell 5 percent, after inflation, during the 2023 financial year, which ran from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023. A slowdown in individual giving — by alumni and others — powered the decline. Alumni contributions fell 13 percent, after inflation, and gifts from individuals who are not alumni decreased at roughly the same rate.
These findings come from the annual Voluntary Support of Education survey, which was conducted by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and released today. The survey includes responses from 757 institutions of higher education.
By comparison, Giving USA estimated a roughly 11 percent decline in total contributions to education — a broader category that includes universities, schools, and other education groups.
Higher-education institutions raised a total of $58 billion in the last financial year, according to the CASE survey. After months of “not entirely positive” news coverage says Sue Cunningham, president and CEO of CASE, “This should be a source of celebration.”
Donations to colleges came primarily from organizations such as family foundations, donor-advised funds, and corporations. This accounted for $37.5 billion in support, or 65 percent. Support from these organizations stayed flat year-over-year. Because donor-advised funds are counted as organizations in the survey, the category includes individual donors who give through them.
“Many individuals who historically would have been counted in the individual category are now giving through donor-advised funds,” says Cunningham. “It’s certainly a vehicle that we’ve seen growing.”
Despite the decline in overall dollars raised in 2023, giving from mega donors — those who made contributions of $100 million or more — was a bright spot in the survey. The amount and value of these gifts both grew during the 2023 financial year. The 11 total contributions of this value represented roughly 4 percent of all giving to higher-education institutions. During the 2022 financial year, colleges received seven such gifts, amounting to about 2 percent of total giving.
“Those gifts are often referred to as transformational gifts because of the huge impact that they have on institutions,” Cunningham says. “In my experience, for donations of this scale to be possible, it shows incredible vision and engagement on the part of the institution and the part of the donor.”
Mixed Results for Campuses
Last year’s decline in giving comes after an exceptionally good fundraising year in 2022. That year, colleges and universities raised $59.5 billion, and the sector saw its biggest jump in overall giving since 2000.
The decline has less to say about donors’ interest in supporting higher education than it does about the health of their assets at year-end, when it’s most financially advantageous for donors to make big gifts, Cunningham says. “The stock market plays a key part in all of that.”
For some colleges, the good times of 2022 were still rolling. Roughly half of survey respondents said giving to their college increased in 2023 — even as overall contributions to higher education fell.
“This is an amalgam of data. For some, they obviously saw a drop, but for others they saw increases,” Cunningham says. “Taking one year in isolation is informative, but I think looking at a longer spread is important as well.”
In the four years since Covid-19 temporarily shut down campuses, halting donor visits and events, individuals have stepped up their giving to higher education, says Carla Willis, a managing principal at Washburn & McGoldrick, a fundraising firm that works with schools and colleges.
“Universities re-engaged with their most loyal and committed supporters, and they began to be able to go out and visit with them again and to invite them back to campus again,” she says. Those efforts led to some positive fundraising results in 2023, which Willis says have only accelerated in the current financial year.
Despite headline-grabbing disputes with donors, a noisy presidential election, and other issues, Willis has faith that donors will continue to support colleges and universities this year. “Philanthropy within higher ed is strong,” she says.
Big Gifts Provide Most Funding
A small group of donors who make big gifts continue to drive giving to higher-education institutions. More than half of the total dollars raised by a sample of 236 institutions in 2023 came from contributions of $1 million or more. Just 0.08 percent of all donors in the sample, however, made gifts of this size.
Most contributions — 43 percent — made to colleges in the sample were gifts of $99 or less. However, these gifts were a drop in the bucket, monetarily, representing less than 1 percent of the total dollars raised by that sample of universities.
The report notes that major gifts typically fund universities’ endowments and can be restricted to support certain areas, such as financial aid, academic departments, or faculty and staff salaries. Gifts from everyday donors tend to support research efforts or academic departments.
For example, roughly 40 percent of all gifts to endowments went toward financial aid in 2023. About 10 percent of gifts to current operations in 2023 went toward financial aid.
