Economy

Harvard Receives $1 Billion, as 2015 College Donations Top $40 Billion

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: January 27, 2016 6:36 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 2:32 pm

It is sort of like the 0.01%. Total donations to colleges and universities reached $40.3 billion last year, according to the Council for Aid to Education (CAE). Of that, $1.03 billion went to Harvard and $1.63 billion to Stamford. Donations overall surged.

The CAE, in its annual study, reported:

Charitable contributions to colleges and universities in the United States increased 7.6 percent in 2015, according to the Voluntary Support of Education (VSE) survey, conducted annually by the Council for Aid to Education (CAE). At $40.30 billion, the total is the highest recorded since the inception of the survey in 1957.

The very rich gave the most:

Eight gifts of $100 million or more were reported on the 2015 survey. These eight gifts totaled $1.44 billion and went to four institutions, all of which are among the 20 institutions that raised the most in 2015. In 2014, five gifts of such magnitude totaled $698.55 million.

Since many of the richest people in America presumably went to the most elite universities, the trend makes sense.
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The winners:

Institutions that Raised the Most (and Amount Raised), 2015

1. Stanford University ($1.63 billion)
2. Harvard University ($1.05 billion)
3. University of Southern California ($653.03 million)
4. University of California-San Francisco ($608.58 million)
5. Cornell University ($590.64 million)
6. Johns Hopkins University ($582.68 million)
7. Columbia University ($552.68 million)
8. Princeton University ($549.84 million)
9. Northwestern University ($536.83 million)
10. University of Pennsylvania ($517.20 million)
11. University of California-Los Angeles ($473.21 million)
12. Duke University ($472.01 million)
13. University of Washington ($447.02 million)
14. University of Chicago ($443.79 million)
15. Yale University ($440.81 million)
16. New York University ($439.66 million)
17. Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($439.40 million)
18. University of Michigan ($394.31 million)
19. University of Notre Dame ($379.87 million)
20. University of California-Berkeley ($366.12 million)

Source: CAE is a national nonprofit organization based in New York City. It is the nation’s sole source of empirical data on private giving to education, through the annual VSE survey and its Data Miner interactive database.