Every day universities lose money, that’s the bottom line. It’s not a secret that funding from State and Federal Government fails to meet the needs of the university. It is even more apparent that schools must discover new ways to raise funds, more importantly – try new ideas in order to accomplish this goal. The days of relying on others to give are long gone unless you are in the top 20 schools receiving a donation.
In 2007 donations to colleges and universities grew by 6.3% over the previous year in the United States. 2007 was a record year for donations topping a record of $29.75 billion. The numbers were obtained from the annual Voluntary Support of Education (VSE) survey conducted by the Council for Aid to Education (CAE).
The last 10 years have seen an average increase of 6.5% in contributions to higher education institutions, according to The New York City –based organization; the overall increase is in spite of a decline in alumni giving as a whole.
The top 20 institution represent approximately 25.8% of all donations received. This implies that the top 20 schools either have a marketing plan to be emulated, or maintain the wealthiest alumni. These top institutions received $518.34 million more than they did in 2006, which accounts for 29.6 percent of the total 2007 increase (CAE).
The nation’s top 20 fundraising schools (and dollars received) in 2007 are:
Stanford University ($832.35M), Harvard University ($613.99M), University of Southern California ($469.65M), Johns Hopkins University ($430.46M), Columbia University ($423.85M), Cornell University ($406.93M), University of Pennsylvania ($392.42M), Yale University ($391.32M), Duke University ($372.33M), University of California, Los Angeles ($364.78M), Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($329.16M), University of Chicago ($328.33M), University of Wisconsin-Madison ($325.34M), University of Washington ($300.20M), University of Michigan ($293.40M), University of Minnesota ($288.75M), New York University ($287.59M), University of Virginia ($282.61M), Indiana University ($278.55M) and the University of California, San Francisco ($251.95M).
References: http://www.cae.org/content/pdf/Top%2020%20and%20Results%20By%20State-07.pdf
Image credit: Money Rose on Flickr by distinguish
