Source: The Conversation – USA (2)
In 1638, John Harvard, an English-born Puritan minister and teacher in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, bequeathed 400 books and half his £779 estate, today equivalent to roughly US$2 million, to the college that would be renamed in his honor after his death.
In addition to launching America’s oldest university, Harvard’s donation began a tradition of philanthropy for U.S. colleges and universities that has continued ever since. Today, philanthropy is an important source of higher education funding that covers an average of 10% of college and university budgets.
Based on our decades of experience as scholars, academic administrators and school fundraisers, we believe that donors – and not just big ones – are especially important to colleges and universities in tough times.
In the crosshairs
Since January 2025, the Trump administration has targeted colleges and universities with research funding cuts, student financial aid caps and new restrictions on how long international students can stay in the United States.
University endowments have been in the crosshairs since the first Trump administration’s 2017 tax reform package. The big 2025 tax-and-spending package Trump signed raised the taxes on some schools’ endowments. A rule the Trump administration proposed in September 2026 would threaten private schools’ tax-exempt status if any of their programs use race-based criteria.
There are demographic problems too. Fewer students are choosing to go to college, and the number of high school graduates who could attend is falling due to a declining birthrate.
Although colleges and universities are providing more financial aid than ever, students and their families are still struggling to pay for college.
Some schools are being forced to close their doors. Sixteen colleges shut down in 2025 alone, including Indiana’s only predominantly Black college, Martin University, and ecologically focused Sterling College in Vermont.
And at least 40 colleges have been acquired by other schools since 2020, including Marymount Manhattan College and Mills College, which are now part of Northeastern University’s global network.
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Higher education giving
Donors contributed $79 billion to colleges and universities in 2025, up 4% in constant dollars from the year before.
The richest Americans dominate giving to higher education: 89% of the funds raised came from only 2% of donors in 2025.
Also in 2025, Phil and Penny Knight, the Nike co-founder and his wife, made what was then the largest single gift to a university in history when they gave the Oregon Health & Science University $2 billion for cancer research.
On Sept. 30, 2026, investor Ken Griffin broke that record by giving Carnegie Mellon University more than $3 billion to build a new campus in Miami and meet some other priorities.
It’s hardly the only megagift a university has received in 2026: Michael and Susan Dell, whose fortune comes from his computer hardware company, gave the University of Texas at Austin $750 million for its medical center. The Knights gave $1 billion to the University of Oregon for a new engineering college. Software billionaire David Duffield pledged $371 million to Cornell University. And many other schools have drawn gifts in excess of $100 million.
The vast majority of these huge gifts are reserved for specific purposes. The share of totally unrestricted gifts to colleges and universities, those given with no strings attached, has been dwindling for decades. In 2024 it slipped below 7%. Unrestricted giving did pick up somewhat in 2025. Perhaps that was a sign that some donors were responding to federal funding cuts with their gifts.
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How donors can help
In an article in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning in September 2026, we listed ideas for college and university fundraising efforts. These tie to three recommendations for donors – and not only those making multimillion-dollar gifts.
1. Pooling donations
Donations to colleges and universities don’t have to end in lots of zeros to make a big difference.
In 2015, the grassroots Saving Sweet Briar campaign kept the small women’s college operating even after its trustees had voted to close it. The largest gift the rural Virginia school received was $2 million, and the smallest was $1.50 from a graduate’s grandchild. This is the exception rather than the rule. Financial pressures were too much for Hampshire College, a New England private college that is slated to close after the fall semester of 2026, to withstand – even with a fundraising campaign and $5 million gift from alum and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.
Giving Days are high-profile fundraising campaigns through which many alumni and other supporters raise millions. For example, Oregon State University Dam Proud Day 2026 drew 12,400 gifts and raised over $4.1 million. Purdue University’s annual “day of giving” has generated nearly $500 million over the past decade. In 2024, it garnered $76 million from 32,000 donors.
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2. Donating with few or no strings attached
Donations with few restrictions or none at all help colleges and universities meet their greatest needs.
Even if they’re mostly intended for a new building or to fund a particular program, large gifts can also include unrestricted portions to help cover costs as needs arise and priorities change.
Brandeis University, Indiana University, Princeton University and other schools encourage unrestricted annual gifts. These flexible funds are helping to cover research funding shortfalls at Cornell University, undergraduate scholarships at Georgetown University and general operations at the College of the Atlantic.
Novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has given more than $26 billion in unrestricted donations to nonprofits, including to colleges and universities. Historically Black colleges and universities as well as other schools with diverse student bodies, such as Robeson Community College in rural North Carolina, Oklahoma’s Carl Albert State College and Wisconsin’s Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, have received Scott’s big gifts.
In 1920, the trustees of Berea College, a private liberal arts school in Kentucky, passed a resolution placing future unrestricted bequests, donations made through people’s estates, in the school’s endowment. Berea students do not pay for tuition, fees, housing or food – thanks in large part to those unrestricted donations.
3. Helping students afford all college costs so they can graduate
Supporting students directly helps them go to college, stay in school and graduate.
Donors already make gifts that fund schools’ financial aid packages, with about $7 billion in gifts designated for this purpose in 2025. But the colleges and universities that receive the most dollars from donors serve a small fraction of the nation’s undergraduate students – and not those from low-income families. We recommend that donors consider making gifts to the thousands of colleges and universities, including community colleges, that don’t typically draw big donations and have endowments totaling in the millions, rather than billions, of dollars.
Sometimes it takes more than tuition scholarships for students to graduate. Donors can pay for additional expenses, such as transportation and textbooks, and fund extra academic advising and mentoring. Billionaire philanthropists John and Laura Arnold’s Commit2Completion grant program at Arizona’s Maricopa Community Colleges addresses those kinds of often overlooked priorities.
You don’t have to be very wealthy to fund scholarships. Anyone can pitch in through platforms like Dollars for Scholars. This program’s more than 400 chapters enable local donors to pool their gifts to help students raised in their communities pay college expenses. For example, a rural Minnesota chapter awarded $248,000 to 65 college-bound students in 2025.
There are also hundreds of other place-based “promise programs” that provide tuition and fees scholarships to public colleges and universities in their areas and offer programming such as college readiness workshops and access to local employers.
Philanthropy can’t solve every problem higher education faces. But by giving together, donating with fewer strings attached and helping students pay their college expenses, alumni and other donors can be strategic in how they help.
Genevieve Shaker has received funding from the TIAA Institute and the AFP Foundation for Philanthropy.
William Blomquist and William M. Plater do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/12/what-colleges-and-universities-need-from-donors-to-thrive/