I’d be more inclined to donate to my university if I thought the money would be used sensibly.
Instead they are making the only professor of medieval german (the dept where I studied) redundant, yet spending £20m on a brand new students’ union building (this in a major UK city with more lesiure, cultural and entertainment facilities than you can shake a stick at).
How true is this? Seems to me my college uses the donation money to build football stadiums, not offset student tuition, although I’d welcome the news that it’s more complicated than that.
Until shown otherwise, my attitude is: I paid my tuition when I went there (me, not my parents), and I was jerked around bureaucratically at every turn. I owe them nothing.
Not to pry too much, Mach, but I’m wondering where you went to college that has recently built a football stadium of any kind…
My experience with athletics fundraising is that there are really only a handful of schools raising big-time athletics dollars. Even mid-level Division I schools are struggling these days, and a number of schools are dropping teams for lack of funding. I can’t say more about the other schools without betraying confidences.
MIT doesn’t have a football stadium, so I’m safe. You often can target your donation to a specific purpose - I supported the much needed renovation of my dorm for a while (and have an old doorknob to show for it.)
How specific? When I’m a best selling author, can I donate money to my univeristy with the stipulation that they must invest part of my donation in putting left-handed desks into the lecture halls?
You can probably require money be spent on left handed desks.
One thing they normally don’t like is if you try to say they should (or should not) teach something. They view that as interfering with academic freedom. For example Duke turned down a big donor because he wanted to approve professors hired with his money.
I won’t say which school, although it’s not a big Division 1 with a 40,000 seat facility. But checking the web site just now I see the new stadium was completed a few years ago.
It seats 6500, has an auxiliary practice field adjacent, a modern press box, coach’s rooms, VIP lounge (with elevator), two 73-locker team rooms, two 15-locker coaching rooms, and an athletic training facility.
It doesn’t say exactly how it was paid for. Maybe it was targeted donations from alumni with other money going elsewhere. Even so, if this is the school’s priority I see even less reason to give money to my alma mater. Oh, and I went to school to become a PE teacher and I still think this was a colossal waste of money.
Part of the fun of donating is you can reward or punish your school for doing stuff you do or don’t like. If you give enough money you can get your name on a scholarship, or even a building if it’s a sufficient amount.
And if you donate a really huge wad, you can have an enormous public snit over being disrespected if the university doesn’t cater to your whims.
After I graduated from med school, I had a fantasy for awhile of giving a decent gift to the school if only they’d trash the shitty gross anatomy textbook I had to use (if I’d won the multistate lottery I might have considered trying for a mass layoff of the anatomy faculty).
Say…that wouldn’t happen to be a stadium that a certain NFL team uses as a training camp facility, would it? Yes, I think there were more than school athletic factors at play there. I won’t say any more.
Not that I know of. It’s nowhere near any NFL team, and there’s nothing about that on the website.
Only once or twice a year? how on earth did you manage that? I’m lucky if a week doesn’t go by without a phone call, email, letter, or postcard asking me to donate.
I did think it was much more ridiculous when I was a recent graduate and like most of my classmates owed huge amounts in loans that they’d call and ask me to donate. What on earth did they think I was going to donate with? I had no money, I’d promised everything I’d earn for the next ten years to them and they knew it.
My last experience with Penn was a nasty dispute over $75 they owed me and wouldn’t pay for some invented reason. I won’t give them money and told them so repeatedly. But the letters and phone calls (from students) never cease.
I might mention that $75 was important to me in 1962 when I would not get paid again until the end of September. They did eventually come through with it, but only because I hadn’t turned in marks yet. The results left a very sour taste in my mouth.
They probably spam everyone for the same reason elite products advertise in the New Yorker – not because everyone is ultra-rich but because they might be in the future. They’re probably hoping that those who do run into money to spare later on in life will remember the school due to advertising, similar to advertisers who hope that those few who do achieve that upper-middle class or lower-upper class lifestyle that they aspire to will buy their products once they’ve reached their goal.
My school opened a brand new $55 million stadium and a $100 million arena complex in 2007.
I was a National Merit Scholar. That’s one of those awards that colleges like to boast about: “We have 27 National Merit Scholars attending right now…” I had a recruiter from Harvard come out to try to get me to go there. I keep wanting to suggest that my college owes me for my choice to go there.
I actually had an aunt and uncle who died very wealthy, and in their will left a substantial amount to a university. A wing of a building is named for them now.
I give every year to my undergraduate college, because it was a great experience, they made me feel like I was part of the community, and they need it badly. I have never given to my law school because they basically told me “we don’t care what you think, you’re here for three years and gone.” And, they don’t need it.
Here is a link to several different pieces of information regarding the University of Texas budget. One link is an easy to understand powerpoint presentation.
To bottom line it for you, tuition makes up only 25% of their overall budget. State support only makes up 14%. Therefore, 61% of budget is made up of other sources of revenue. Those two items (tuition and state support) do not even come close to covering salaries.
Further, athletics at the University of Texas is entirely self supporting. The school provides no funds whatsoever toward the athletic department. In fact, the opposite situation exists. The athletic department donated $20MM to the University during 2010 alone.
I donate to both the University and the athletic department annually. First, I feel an obligation to give back to a school that significantly helped shape who I am and the success I have had. Second, the success of the school helps improve the value of my degree.
I think that you can specify that the money be spent on anything you like, and if it’s something that the university would spend money on anyway, they’re happy to use it that way. Here are some rules and restrictions about university endowments. This article notes that all restrictions that you place on your money can be broken in court and small (less than $25000) and old (20 years or more) restrictions don’t even have to be taken to court.
SMU would not release my transcript. I found this out when my potential very first employer explained they couldn’t get my transcript b/c there was a hold on it due to a past due account with the university. Great humiliating first impression, eh?
When I called they claimed I owed them $50 for an overdue library book, some French Lit book written in French. This was a course I had never taken written in a language I did not speak. They did not believe me, got nasty, and refused to release my transcript unless I paid. So I did, extremely pissed off about it but needing my transcript.
Then I found out a year or so later that they had reported the $50 to a credit bureau. That took a year to clear up and cost me a few lower interest rates in the process.
Thanks to that nickel-and-dime bullshit which happened in 1992, they have not nor will they ever get one red cent from me for as long as I live.