“Ding dong, the witch is dead,” one higher-ed consultant wrote on LinkedIn.
Which witch? In May, U.S. News & World Report announced that it would no longer consider the proportion of alumni who donate to a college each year in its rankings formula. This year’s undergraduate-program lists, to be published in the fall, will be the first in more than 30 years not to consider “alumni participation rates,” as the metric is called in the field.
“As soon as fund raisers woke up to the announcement that day, my phone started ringing,” Brian Gawor, a consultant with the higher-ed advising firm Ruffalo Noel Levitz, told The Chronicle. As Gawor put it during a June webinar about the news: “A lot of people had questions because, in many cases, people’s budgets, their resource allotments, and certainly their strategy, was often based around that APR statistic being in the rankings.”
The U.S. News announcement kicked into high gear a conversation that had already been happening in the field. Many college fund raisers had come to believe that common tactics used to drive people to give — like tchotchke giveaways and interclass competitions — were “transactional,” didn’t tap into the right philanthropic spirit, and didn’t encourage alumni to keep donating in the long run. Not to mention persistent stories in the field about colleges manipulating their numbers to try to juice their institution’s ranking.
Meanwhile, nationally, the number of Americans who donate to their alma maters has been falling for more than two decades. As one artificial reason to focus on alumni giving is falling away, fund raisers are wondering: Will they be able to build a broad giving base for the future?
U.S. News materials say it included each college’s alumni-giving rate in its rankings in the past because the statistic “measures student satisfaction.” Now, as the publication plans to put more weight on colleges’ “success in graduating students from different backgrounds,” alumni giving, alongside three other measures, is getting the boot.
For much of its history in the rankings formula, alumni giving counted for 5 percent of a college’s overall score. In 2021, that dropped to 3 percent.
The idea that a college could rise in ranking by improving on a metric that counted for so little is “absurd,” said Andrew Shaindlin, a consultant with Grenzebach Glier and Associates. Nevertheless, trustees and college presidents would often see the alumni-giving metric in the formula and think that it was an easy lever, and direct their advancement offices to pull it, said Colin D. Hennessy, vice president for alumni and donor engagement at the University of Iowa. Shaindlin said he had once gotten such a directive himself, when he oversaw alumni relations at Carnegie Mellon University, a decade ago. He asked a colleague to check the data, which found that even raising Carnegie Mellon’s alumni-giving rate from about 20 to about 30 percent — which Shaindlin called “unheard of” — would only halve the gap between CMU and the next-ranked university. (CMU ended up pursuing a higher giving rate anyway, in hopes of expanding the pool of alumni who donate.)
Stories of bad behavior abound in the field. Consultants and administrators working in college-advancement offices talk about seeing others perform “denominator management.” Alumni-giving rates are calculated by dividing the number of alumni who donate each year by the number of “contact-able” alumni. So offices might not try too hard to contact all alumni, dropping people from their rolls in order to reduce the denominator in the calculation. That doesn’t just defy the spirit of the measurement. “You’re being inequitable, probably, in your practices because you’re trying to wipe out broad groups of people from your denominator,” Shalonda Martin, senior director for advancement services at Pomona College, said during another webinar about U.S. News’ announcement.
More aboveboard, but still frowned upon, strategies include giving away favors such as branded socks, and telling alumni explicitly — before it was known U.S. News would remove the metric from its formula — that giving helps the college’s ranking and reputation. The former may not build genuine affection or the potential for a bigger donation down the road. And the latter arguably wasn’t even true. “The decision whether to use that appeal was based on whether it worked,” Shaindlin said. “It was not based on whether it was factually correct.”
There’s nothing wrong with trying to improve alumni-donation rates, fund raisers say, as it diversifies the college’s base of financial support, reducing their reliance on a few big donors. Giving small amounts to the annual fund is also correlated with eventually making bigger gifts, most college fund raisers told The Chronicle, based on their own institutions’ data. But the metric’s presence in the U.S. News rankings formula encouraged “short term, ‘We need to get these numbers up as quickly as possible’” thinking, said James Barnard, a consultant with BWF, a firm that dispenses advice to nonprofits. “That’s not helping build sustainable fund-raising programs.”
Meanwhile, the number of alumni who give to their colleges has been trending downward since 1999, according to annual surveys run by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Some of that decline may be because more wealthy people are using their family foundations and anonymous investment funds to give, which CASE doesn’t count as “alumni donations,” even when they originate from alumni. However, those who work in college fund-raising offices also talk about deeper changes in their student bodies. More college students now come from families or cultures where there’s not a tradition of donating to the college you attended. Students and families are more skeptical of higher education, and want more flexibility to designate exactly where their dollars go, instead of giving to a general unrestricted fund. If a college doesn’t make that possible, then they may lose out on the donation altogether. Finally, heavy student-debt burdens erode alumni’s ability and appetite to give.
Hounding calls and emails, branded socks and mint-julep cups, T-shirts commemorating the 100th anniversary of that one time, in 1921, when Centre College beat Harvard University at football — Centre had done it all to try to hit high annual alumni-giving numbers. U.S. News’ rankings were “always kind of in the back of our minds,” said Kelly H. Knetsche, the vice president for development and alumni engagement. Most recently, the college was also motivated to try to get back donors who had disappeared during the pandemic, she said. Yet even as overall giving to the college went up, thanks to big donors, the annual fund started failing to meet its goals. A college’s annual fund is where many smaller donations go. The fund isn’t tied up in the endowment, and colleges can use the money right away, often for anything they need. At Centre, alumni donors to the annual fund had become conditioned to expect presents while simultaneously getting inured to the kind of low-cost tokens these programs used.
So, in the fall of 2022, Centre brought in a consultant — Barnard, from BWF — and he recommended an overhaul. The college was to move away from blanketing alumni with annual-giving pleas and toward a more targeted, personalized approach that emphasized the current students that donations help.
“We are in the process of making some pretty significant shifts,” Knetsche said.
Fund-raising appeals at Centre are now supposed to tell alumni what kinds of student experiences donations support, rather than asking people to help the college reach some numerical donation-rate goal. Centre made it easier for donors to specify where their money goes, rather than giving to the general fund. Officers are trying to introduce donors to scholarship recipients. They had long done so for endowed scholarships, but are now seeking to make it happen for smaller donors, too. “What we really want people to do is feel good about their investment in the college and see the impact of their philanthropy and become lifelong donors,” Knetsche said.
Officials hope that at least a few of the younger alumni who give $20 today will eventually become more established in their careers, and feel moved to give $20,000 some decades in the future.
Knetsche expects that Centre’s alumni-giving rate may dip temporarily. It was 36 percent in U.S. News’ last dataset, putting it among the top 20 in the country for that metric among liberal-arts colleges. If all goes as planned, however, the college should be better off than if it had stuck with the more rate-focused strategies of the past. But only time will tell.
