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Colleges That Raised the Most in Private Donations, FY 2016

Almanac 2017 August 13, 2017

All but one of the private nonprofit institutions and two of the public institutions that raised the most in private donations for the 2016 fiscal year were doctoral universities with the highest research activity, as classified by the 2015 Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. (If multiple campuses were considered together, that classification is for the main campus.) The universities that did the best at raising private donations were generally ones that already had very large endowments.

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Public institutions

Rank	Institution	Amount raised
1.	U. of California at San Francisco	$595,940,070
2.	U. of Washington, multiple campuses	$541,444,150
3.	U. of California at Los Angeles	$498,800,296
4.	U. of Michigan, multiple campuses	$433,775,518
5.	Ohio State U., multiple campuses	$386,111,783
6.	Indiana U., multiple campuses	$360,935,740
7.	U. of California at Berkeley	$348,865,132
8.	U. of Texas at Austin	$345,991,576
9.	U. of Minnesota, multiple campuses	$345,640,311
10.	U. of Oklahoma at Norman	$322,435,573
11.	U. of Wisconsin at Madison	$318,828,052
12.	U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	$308,694,373
13.	U. of Colorado, multiple campuses	$281,481,973
14.	Texas A&M U. at College Station	$276,474,802
15.	U. of Virginia	$245,391,966
16.	U. of Florida	$243,666,490
17.	U. of Nebraska, multiple campuses	$214,458,958
18.	U. of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center	$208,481,621
19.	U. of California at San Diego	$206,872,666
20.	U. of Utah	$201,854,380

Private nonprofit institutions

Rank	Institution	Amount raised
1.	Harvard U.	$1,187,530,292
2.	Stanford U.	$951,149,098
3.	U. of Southern California	$666,640,686
4.	Johns Hopkins U.	$657,292,634
5.	Cornell U.	$588,261,922
6.	Columbia U.	$584,808,916
7.	U. of Pennsylvania	$542,850,553
8.	Yale U.	$519,146,339
9.	Duke U.	$506,440,564
10.	New York U.	$461,149,577
11.	U. of Chicago	$443,304,691
12.	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	$419,752,498
13.	Northwestern U.	$401,679,496
14.	U. of Notre Dame	$371,762,438
15.	Washington U. in St Louis	$269,876,662
16.	Princeton U.	$267,875,832
17.	U. of Miami	$236,333,647
18.	Dartmouth College	$227,037,580
19.	Brown U.	$207,725,021
20.	Emory U.	$192,699,880

Note: Data on private donations are based on survey responses from more than 950 institutions to the Council for Aid to Education’s Voluntary Support of Education survey. The survey tracked gifts that were received, not just promised, during the 2016 fiscal year, which ended on June 30, 2016, for most institutions. More data are at http://cae.org/vse-data-miner/vse-survey.

Sources: Council for Aid to Education

A version of this article appeared in the August 18, 2017, issue.

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