Dive Brief:
- U.S. colleges received $58 billion in philanthropic support during the 2023 fiscal year, a 2.5% decline from the prior year, according to an annual survey from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
- That amount is the second highest on record, showing the level of support is strong despite a single-year decline, according to Ann Kaplan, senior director of the CASE Voluntary Support of Education survey.
- Kaplan noted that the stock market trended downward in late 2022 and that donors often time their gifts to coincide with growth periods.
Dive Insight:
The near-record level of gifts suggests donors still support higher education, according to the announcement of the results. The findings come even as polls show Americans are increasingly questioning the value of college.
“Recent headlines too frequently cast a negative light on the value of institutions of higher education,” Sue Cunningham, president and CEO of CASE, said in a statement Wednesday. “However, the trust demonstrated by this level of philanthropy tells a different story.”
In fiscal 2023, giving from organizations — which includes foundations, donor-advised funds and corporations — rose 2.7%, according to the findings. Overall, organizations gave $37.5 billion to colleges.
Meanwhile, personal giving declined. Donations from alumni dropped 11.1% in fiscal 2023 compared to the prior year, totaling $12 billion. Nonalumni giving fell 10.5% over the same period to a total of $8.5 billion.
The stock market likely influenced the results.
Many of the major stock indices were down at the end of the 2022 calendar year — a crucial period for tax purposes, according to the report. “This could have led donors who intended to make major gifts in 2023 to postpone the payments until the market recovered,” the report said.
In fiscal 2023, colleges received 11 gifts of $100 million or more. They collectively totaled $2.2 billion, accounting for 3.9% of total giving to higher ed that year.
That’s up from fiscal 2022, when colleges received just seven gifts of that value, which totaled nearly $1.1 billion. That year, gifts of $100 million or more made up 1.8% of total higher ed giving.
Large gifts usually fund endowments, the report noted. Donors typically restrict this support to go toward student financial aid and employee compensation. Meanwhile, smaller gifts typically go toward research funding.
A small number of donations account for the majority of the funds that colleges receive, according to a sample of 236 colleges that disaggregated their donations by amount. For instance, gifts over $25 million made up less than 0.1% of contributions, but accounted for 10.6% of total giving.
Conversely, gifts under $500 accounted for 78.7% of contributions. But they represented just 1.5% of funding that colleges received.
This year’s survey data came from 757 institutions.
