After years of steady growth, fund raisers predict that the final tally on giving to education will be relatively flat for 2008 and that giving will decline slightly in the year ahead, according to a forecasting survey by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
In the second report from its Fundraising Index, a twice-yearly survey of senior fund raisers at colleges, universities, and private schools, CASE estimates that education fund raising for 2008 will show a 0.3-percent growth above the total for the year before, which was $29.75-billion, according to the Council for Aid to Education’s Voluntary Support of Education survey (The Chronicle, February 20, 2008). That survey’s figures for 2008 are expected late next month.
The 242 responders to CASE’s survey, conducted January 6 to 14, predicted giving would go down 1.7 percent in 2009.
CASE started its Fundraising Index last July. The results of the latest survey, which are scheduled for release this morning, show a significant shift in attitude since the earlier survey, when senior fund raisers predicted that education giving would grow by 5.3 percent for the academic year starting July 1, down only slightly from the average 7-percent annual growth rate of recent years (The Chronicle, July 15, 2008).
“We’ve grown used to a nice steady pattern of growth, year in and year out,” said John Lippincott, president of CASE. But after a bruising final quarter for the economy and major losses in the financial markets, typically optimistic fund raisers are seeing the effects of the recession in their giving programs.
The CASE survey’s results are similar to what fund-raising consultants and senior college administrators have said in the last month, that results for 2008 will probably be flat and that donations are likely to decline next year as the economy struggles to recover from the downturn (The Chronicle, January 9). Bruce Flessner, a fund-raising consultant, told The Chronicle last month that he expected giving to higher education to drop by 4 percent to 5 percent in 2009.
Mr. Lippincott predicted that educational giving would hit a plateau or show slight declines in the next several years. On the positive side, he said, education philanthropy is performing better than other parts of the economy or financial markets, which have shown much sharper declines.
“If we have a plateau for a couple of years, we are still going to be raising an awful lot of money in support of education,” he said. “It’s not like taking us back to square one. It’s taking us back a year or two, if this pans out.”
If the predicted drop does happen this year, it would be only the third year in the last two decades in which philanthropic support declined, according to CASE. The other years were 1987-88 and 2001-2.
Not all of the fund raisers who answered the survey were having a hard time. Mr. Lippincott said about 13 percent of responders said their fund raising was up 15 percent from the year before. About the same number—12 percent—said their fund raising was down by that much.
Mr. Lippincott said he hoped fund raisers would use the survey results to recalibrate their philanthropic expectations for the year ahead. But lower fund-raising totals shouldn’t mean colleges should let up on their contacts with donors and alumni, he said, because working hard at maintaining good relationships will benefit colleges when the economy does turn around.
