In a finding that could complicate the debate over legacy preferences in college admissions, a new study of alumni of a selective research university has concluded that those with broad family ties to their alma mater tend to be the most generous to it.
While past studies have focused on the question of whether some alumni donate generously to colleges in hopes of improving the admissions prospects of their own children, the new study’s results, issued last month, show that an array of other family connections to a college can trigger giving as well. Having a parent, spouse, aunt or uncle, niece or nephew, or certain in-laws who attended the same institution all appeared to make alumni more likely to donate to it and, in some cases, seemed to prompt donors to give significantly larger amounts.
Such findings are “consistent with the notion that families bond with universities” for reasons that extend well beyond a practical desire to improve their relatives’ admissions prospects, a working paper summarizing the study’s results says.
The new study was conducted by Jonathan Meer, a Stanford University doctoral student who recently accepted a position as an assistant professor of economics at Texas A&M University at College Station, and Harvey S. Rosen, a professor of economics and business policy at Princeton University and co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies there. They analyzed proprietary data on more than 12,600 alumni made available to them by a selective research university whose identity they agreed to conceal, referring to it only as “Anon U.”
In a 2007 study, Mr. Meer and Mr. Rosen looked at the long-term giving patterns of graduates of the same selective research university and found that the generosity of those whose children applied there increased as the children approached college age, but plummeted if their children were rejected. Two past studies of alumni of small liberal-arts colleges, by other researchers, found a correlation between graduates’ generosity to their alma maters and the number of relatives they had who attended the same college, but the data did not distinguish among types of family members to assess which types of family ties are most likely to trigger giving.
Next-Generation Generosity
In their new study, Mr. Meer and Mr. Rosen sought to determine which types of family members have the biggest impact on alumni giving. The two researchers compared registrar-office data on people who graduated from Anon U. from 1972 to 2005 with development-office data on the alumni’s postgraduate education, careers, marriages, and contributions to their alma mater from 1983 to 2007.
The researchers sought to account for differences in academic and professional achievement and other background variables to help make sure family connections were the only possible influence on giving they examined. To help prevent their data’s being skewed by a few exceptionally large gifts or the patronage of a few rich families, they conducted one analysis after excluding data on the most generous 1 percent of alumni in any given class, and another after excluding data on the most generous 1 percent of families. Neither alteration significantly changed their results.
In a finding that appeared to affirm other research showing that people contribute to their alma maters partly to try to help other relatives get in, Mr. Meer and Mr. Rosen found that the attendance of members of a younger generation—children, nieces and nephews, and sons-in-law or daughters-in-law—had a greater effect on alumni giving than did the attendance of member of older generations, such as parents, aunts and uncles, or the parents of spouses. The probability of alumni’s making gifts increased by 12.9 percentage points if a child of theirs attended, and those gifts were about 48 percent larger than the ones given by alumni without family connections.
The attendance of a son-in-law or daughter-in-law was associated with a 4-percentage-point increase in the likelihood of donating and a 13-percent increase in the average size of the contribution. The attendance of a niece or nephew was associated with a 7.4-percentage-point increase in the likelihood of donating, but not with any statistically significant increase in the amount given.
The apparent impact on giving of attendance of members of an older generation was smaller but, in many cases, significant nonetheless, with the attendance of parents being associated with a 1.7-percentage point increase in the likelihood of giving; of aunts and uncles, with a 2.8-percentage point increase; and of mothers-in-law or fathers-in-law, with a 3.7-percentage-point increase.
The Gratitude Factor
Mr. Meer and Mr. Rosen argue in their paper that such findings offer evidence that families bond with colleges for reasons have nothing to do with legacy preferences, given the unlikelihood that children would donate to their alma mater to ease—or express appreciation for—the admission of their parents.
In an interview, Mr. Rosen acknowledged that their analysis failed to account for another possibility—that, given the existence of legacy preferences in higher education, many children of alumni might donate generously out of gratitude for their own admission. But, he said, the analysis, which accounted for SAT scores and admissions-office rankings, found that alumni’s children were more likely to donate even when they had been admitted with high qualifications, suggesting that more is at work than the gratitude of people admitted as a result of legacy status.
Alumni with parental connections to the university actually contributed smaller amounts than alumni whose parents had not attended. That finding was “not easy to interpret,” the researchers said, but “might indicate that there is some kind of substitution of giving between generations of the nuclear family,” with the children of alumni feeling they did not need to donate as much because their parents also were contributing.
The study found that alumni whose spouses had attended the university were 12.3 percentage points likelier to donate in any given year than were those whose spouse had not. Having a sibling, cousin, or brother-in-law or sister-in-law who attended the university did not substantially increase the likelihood of giving, although, among alumni who did donate, those with a sibling who attended the university contributed about 6 percent more.
Having grandparents who attended the same university did not have a discernible impact on either the likelihood of alumni’s donating or the amount the donors among them contributed.
Contrary to other research that has found gender-linked differences in philanthropic behavior, the new study’s findings did not vary significantly according to the sex of the alumni members examined or of the relative in question.
A few findings hinted that the alumni of the unnamed research university were fairly well-to-do. Nearly 64 percent of those with relatives who attended the institution donated in any given year, with the average amount given being $1,114. About 51 percent of alumni without relatives who attended gave in any given year, with their contributions averaging $837.
“We are not sure of how applicable the results will be to other institutions,” Mr. Rosen said. But the study’s findings suggest that colleges might be wise to emphasize broad family ties to their institutions in fund-raising appeals, he suggested. Based on his own personal observations gleaned from reading alumni magazines, he said, “the universities kind of like the idea of having multigenerational participation,” and “it does create a good feeling when families are involved.”
