College giving at $28b record

Prosperous alumni helped make 2006 a record fund-raising year for colleges and universities, which hauled in an all-time high of $28 billion -- a 9.4 percent jump from the previous year.

There were increases across the board, but it was the already wealthy who fared best. Stanford's $911 million was the most ever collected by a single university, and raised the staggering possibility of a billion-dollar fund-raising year in the not-too-distant future.

Nationally, donations from alumni rose 18.3 percent from 2005, according to new figures released yesterday by the Council for Aid to Education. Alumni donations account for about 30 percent of giving to higher education.

Survey director Ann Kaplan said the strong economy played a role, but universities also were asking more aggressively as part of formal fund-raising campaigns.

Colleges "are making a good case for support," Kaplan said.

The Council for Aid to Education survey contains good news for a number of schools with small endowments that saw large percentage jumps, such as Wagner College in New York and the University of La Verne in California.

But in absolute dollars, the wealthiest institutions still dominate -- and are expanding their lead. Last year, the top 10 fund-raising universities collected 16.3 percent of all gifts, or $4.6 billion, compared with 14.7 percent in 2005. The top 20 institutions accounted for more than a quarter of all fund-raising.

Stanford was followed by Harvard, which raised $595 million, Yale ($433 million), and the University of Pennsylvania ($409 million). The biggest fund-raising schools are research institutions with medical schools that typically attract private support from well beyond their alumni base.

Rounding out the top 10 were Cornell, Southern California, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Duke, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which was the top fund-raiser among public universities.