Once or twice a year, sometimes more, I receive in the mail a nice letter from the colleges I attended asking for donations to help “support the university,” “continue our excellence,” etc. I can’t throw these things away fast enough. I gave them plenty of money for tuition, they’re not getting another dime out of me.
Don’t get me wrong, I had a great time when I was there, I learned a lot and I would readily recommend it to anyone, but aside from taking their side when the football/basketball/lacrosse/whatever team is playing on the TV, I don’t feel I owe them any particular allegiance, especially monetarily. Frankly it seems quite presumptuous on their part to be asking me for more money after I’ve already graduated. They can go fuck themselves; get their money from some other sucker.
No idea. I get it, too. The worst was getting an invitation to come to some event where we’d phone other alumnae and ask for donations. Getting asked to volunteer to telemarket? Yeah, no…
Have you tried informing them that you don’t want to donate and asking them not to contact you again? My guess is that most alumni offices would be happy to oblige; they don’t want to waste time and resources where they can’t expect a return, after all. Many alumni start donating later in life when they have more disposable income, so the college can’t assume that you never will donate just because you never have, unless you tell them so.
As for why they expect you to donate, it’s because plenty of alumni do donate – because being an active alumnus of XXX University is a part of their identity, or because they want to pay their respects to an institution that has greatly enriched their lives, or because they had a scholarship and want to pay it forward, or because they’re aware that the college is struggling financially. There are lots of reasons. If none of them work for you, you’re free to say no, but I don’t see how it’s presumptuous of the college to ask.
(That said, I do think it’s a bit presumptuous that I still get requests from the college where I worked as a visiting assistant professor for a year, volunteered constantly for stuff because I was hoping for a tenure-track offer, went through the whole interview process, and then got jilted in favor of another candidate at the last minute. But that’s an entirely different situation.)
The third sentence in this paragraph seems to directly contradict the first two. If I worked in development I would keep sending cheap postcards and virtually free e-mails to alums if I thought they might start donating money at some point in the future.
From someone who works in university fundraising, and teaches a fundraising class, this is my advice:
Ask them not to send you anything.
If you’re convinced you never want to give money to your educational institutions, well, there’s nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. And that’s perfectly OK with me, from a general as well as specific standpoint. Some of my colleagues in fundraising may believe otherwise, but I think “everyone must give back” is an unreasonable expectation. I’ve spent too long around those who say that “we must treat never-givers as if they are potential goldmines.” If you’re convinced you won’t give, anything we spend in trying to solicit you for a donation is wasted money, and something we could spend on more efforts in working on the alumni who may be interested.
That said:
I’ve been lucky enough to see the impact that university fundraising makes to American education from both sides. As a student I received a scholarship that wouldn’t have happened without donor support, and my tuition would have been thousands of dollars more without the annual fund of our university. As a fundraiser I’ve seen hundreds–maybe thousands–of students who might not have gone to college without philanthropic financial aid. And I’ve watched buildings go up, programs launched, academic chairs endowed, and lives changed because of the generosity of donors. It’s one thing to say that philanthropy isn’t for you; it’s not for everyone. But pretending it doesn’t make a difference, that’s bunk.
Bottom line is, if your college didn’t ask its alumni for money, you’d probably be owing thousands of dollars more in student debt, and your college experience would have been greatly diminished. So you can survive two pieces of mail a year, to be honest, for that.
Frankly, enlightened self-interest dictates supporting your old college. Anything that helps the school function better helps it create more successful graduates - and graduates in responsible positions increase the prominence (and thus, value) of your own degree. I don’t have the income to donate much, but I’m always happy to help students at my old college and law school for precisely this reason. Their success is useful to me, and I can afford the effort to help them, so it’s prudent to do so.
Where is the contradiction? I am saying that the OP needs to actively inform the college that he does not intend to donate, ever, and request that they take him off their mailing list. Otherwise, it is perfectly reasonable for them to assume that he may decide to start donating in the future.
Maye once I’ve paid off my college debt I’ll consider donating to my college but as long as I’m still paying for my education that can burn to the ground. On the other hand I donate thousands of dollars to my high school and will do that as long as I’m able.
Because many alumni start donating later in life when they have more disposable income, so the college can’t assume that you never will donate just because you never have, even if you say so.
May I remind you that American students pay thousands - often tens of thousands - of dollars for their college education while many other countries subsidize universities so those students pay less or nothing?
The difficult job (and, of course, the one I’ve been tasked with to some extent) is to figure out when the cost of contacting those alumni who haven’t yet given is outweighed by the potential return. And alumni who actively say they’re not going to give are, paradoxically, more likely to give than alumni who just ignore you*…but, of course, we are honor-bound not to contact them if they ask not to be.
So it’s not simply a matter of “we’re going to drop this mailing to every alum whether they’ve given or not.” One simple mailing is going to cost us at least eighty cents apiece once we pay for postage, printing costs, reply envelopes, etc. If we can cut down on mailing to alumni who won’t respond, that can potentially save us thousands of dollars per mailing. So it’s a balancing act.
*I believe, although I will have to check the numbers, that we actually received more last year from alumni who told us they would never donate to us than from alumni who hadn’t said they would never donate but hadn’t done so up until last year. Really.
First of all, it’s just another charity, which you can choose to support or not.
I get many letters from different kinds of charities: My college, the cancer society, the library foundation, local museums, the Red Cross, etc. It’s endless. Some I send money to, some I don’t. It’s obviously completely up to me to decide what charities to support. Similarly, it is completely up to you to decide what charities you want to support. If you would rather not support your college, but put your charity dollars elsewhere, that’s perfectly fine as far as I am concerned.
But for me personally, I do make a substantial donation to my college every year. That’s because I got a significant grant from the Alumni Fund while I was there which enabled me to attend the school, and this is my way of paying them back. I have a very successful career which I owe largely to this college.
If you’re going to college in a perfect world, your college education/experience would be paid for, not by Present You, a young person just starting out in life, with very little money or earning power, but by Future You many years down the road, earning a decent income at a good job made possible in part by your college education. Having your education paid for in part by your school’s alumni, while in turn contributing to other students’ education when you’re an alum, is the next best thing.
If my own undergraduate experience had been limited to what I or my parents could directly pay for, it wouldn’t have been nearly as rich. YMMV. I am grateful for what my college’s alumni contributed towards my own education, so I don’t begrudge paying it forward by contributing now. It’s the circle of life, man.
Having never gone to college, I have little regard for my secondary school ( = High School ) and the RC Church should have enough funds to support it; nor yet for my various primary schools, but should my old infants’ school start requesting I may send a million or so.
I think a lot of this depends on where you went. Harvard’s endowment is worth billions of dollars; enough that they could stop charging for tuition completely. Money given to Harvard is effectively wasted.
On the other hand, if you went to a small college or a state university that doesn’t have a football team, your donation could make a real difference.
It doesn’t bother me too much. I donate pretty much every year to my undergraduate institution, because I figure I did enough damage while I was there. I was also involved in an alumni club for a while. I don’t donate to my grad schools because I cared more about my department than the school.
What did make me mad was requests for money from the expensive private school my daughter was going to while I was still paying tuition to them. Now that’s chutzbah.