When you see a headline about a nine-figure gift to a college, the recipient is typically a private institution with an already bulging endowment and a track record of fund-raising prowess. This year, public universities started catching up.
In 2017, eight out of 19 gifts of $100 million or more went to public institutions, according to a list kept by The Chronicle. The eight public universities pulled in nearly $1.7 billion altogether, including a $500-million gift to the University of California at San Francisco from the Helen Diller Foundation, to be used to support faculty members and students, as well as to form an unrestricted “innovation fund” of $100 million. It’s the largest gift in University of California history.
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When you see a headline about a nine-figure gift to a college, the recipient is typically a private institution with an already bulging endowment and a track record of fund-raising prowess. This year, public universities started catching up.
In 2017, eight out of 19 gifts of $100 million or more went to public institutions, according to a list kept by The Chronicle. The eight public universities pulled in nearly $1.7 billion altogether, including a $500-million gift to the University of California at San Francisco from the Helen Diller Foundation, to be used to support faculty members and students, as well as to form an unrestricted “innovation fund” of $100 million. It’s the largest gift in University of California history.
In decades past, public colleges weren’t as focused on fund raising because they didn’t have to be — state support paid the bills. But with such support dwindling and rising tuition vexing both families and lawmakers, public institutions have had to step up their advancement game. The results are starting to show.
Public colleges saw their fund raising grow by 3.9 percent in the 2017 fiscal year, while private colleges saw their fund raising grow by less than 1 percent, according to an annual survey of college fund-raising professionals conducted by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
The surge in big gifts to public higher education is a sign of the “maturation of public-institution advancement programs,” says David G. Bass, senior research consultant at the council.
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They didn’t look at Cal Poly because we weren’t interested. Now we are.
Several factors explain why public colleges are seeing an uptick in giving, especially in the big donations that make up the bulk of fund-raising totals. The continued health of financial markets has left those with means feeling flush, and some want to do something that matters with their wealth. Big donors “see colleges and universities as organizations that are going to have the capacity to really help them fulfill some big, ambitious visions,” Mr. Bass says.
Such visions drive college fund raising. According to a 2015 report by the council, the top 10 percent of donors gave 92 percent of the money raised by the colleges surveyed that year, and the top 1 percent gave 79 percent.
Landing an eight- or nine-figure donation takes years of planning and groundwork, and that is where public colleges have gained ground on their private peers. In the past decade, public-college leadership, and especially boards of trustees, have pivoted to fund raising as dollars from other sources have started to dry up. Public institutions have “put a lot of staff, in particular, into major and principal gifts to try and bring those six-, seven- figure, or bigger, gifts, and many of them are seeing great success,” says Jeff Martin, a senior consultant with the Advancement Forum at EAB, a consulting firm that works with colleges.
Public Colleges’ Advantages
Public colleges even hold some fund-raising advantages over their private peers. Big state universities have many more alumni to cultivate than do relatively small private colleges. Big state universities are complex and manifold institutions, with many different colleges, units, and research projects, and they often work on a scale that small private colleges can’t. That “lends itself to cultivating a diverse donor base with interests all over the board,” Mr. Martin says.
The access and social-mobility missions of much of public higher education appeal to many donors, especially now that the fundamental value of a college degree is under attack in some quarters. “At a period in which there are concerns about sustaining access to education,” says Mr. Bass, “public institutions have a very compelling story to tell.”
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For all of public colleges’ recent fund-raising success, potential pitfalls loom. Decades ago, advancement “was expected to provide the margin of excellence at the institution, to complement core operating funds that came from the state or from tuition,” Mr. Martin says.
But now, advancement offices are often expected to contribute to core revenues, which can be tricky. “Donors today are much less inclined than ever before to give unrestricted gifts that can be used to keep the lights on,” he says.
While big gifts can make a colossal difference to a college’s annual fund-raising total, missing out on a hoped-for big gift or two can do outsize damage to advancement numbers, at least in the short term. For good or ill, “higher education has become more and more dependent on a very, very small number of individuals,” Mr. Martin says.
But, given public higher education’s relatively recent turn to more aggressive and strategic fund raising, and the conditions that encourage big gifts, “there is almost unprecedented opportunity” for public colleges to expand and succeed, Mr. Martin says, and that shift is likely to be permanent.
Lost Potential
Philip S. Bailey, dean emeritus of the College of Science and Mathematics at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, recalls hearing that a long-ago president of the institution used to promise graduates at commencement that the university would never ask them for a dime. But since the 1980s, fund raising has become a bigger and bigger focus at Cal Poly, culminating this year in a gift of $110 million from William and Linda Frost, the largest gift ever made to the California State University system.
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Mr. Bailey, who was instrumental in securing the Frosts’ gift, says he was wary of fund raising when he became dean, in 1983. But, having seen the transformative effect of the millions the university has raised over the years, he now looks back and sees decades of lost potential; the university largely stood by as alumni aged into their prime earning years. “There were lots of alums who reached into their sixties and seventies and eighties, and were looking for some place to make a difference in the world, but they didn’t look at Cal Poly because we weren’t interested,” he says. “Now we are.”
Public Colleges That Got More Than $100 Million
U. of California at San Francisco: from the Helen Diller Foundation, $500 million
U. of Washington: from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $279 million
U. of Maryland at College Park: from the A. James and Alice B. Clark Foundation, $219 million
U. of California at Irvine: from Susan and Henry Samueli, $200 million
U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: from Larry and Beth Gies, $150 million
U. of Arkansas at Fayetteville: from the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation, $120 million
U. of Hawaii-Manoa: from Jay Shidler, $117 million
California Polytechnic State U. at San Luis Obispo: from William and Linda Frost, $110 million
Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.