Colleges and universities received record amounts of money this past year. Kaitlin Mulhere from Inside Higher Ed reports.

Deep-Pocket Donors

Charitable donations to colleges reached an all-time high of nearly $38 billion last year, according to an annual survey released today by the Council for Aid to Education.

Donors increased the amount they gave colleges in 2014 by 10.8 percent, up from $33.8 billion in 2013, which was the previous historic high. Without adjusting for inflation, the growth between 2013 and 2014 was the largest since 2000.

Gifts from all sources, including alumni, corporations and foundations, were up in 2014, although each source’s proportion of the total was roughly the same as it was in 2013.
While donations were up at most categories of institutions, a huge chunk of the total was brought in by a small group of elite American institutions. The top 20 colleges in fund-raising brought in more than $10 billion. That means that 28.6 percent of the total was given to fewer than 2 percent of the roughly 1,000 institutions that participated in the Council’s Voluntary Support of Education survey.

Harvard University tops the list (see below) with its $1.16 billion haul, and it became the second university to pass the $1 billion threshold after Stanford did in 2012. Of the top 20 universities, 5 are in California, including 3 within the University of California System.

Some of the other universities on the top of the list were boosted by large-scale, one-time gifts. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, placed seventh thanks to a nearly $217 million art gift that accounted for more than 40 percent of the university’s total. Likewise, Northwestern University is a newcomer on the list after more than doubling its intake with $616 million last year as part of a multiyear capital campaign.

University fund-raising efforts were lifted by a strong stock period that saw the four major stock indexes increase by double-digit percentage rates. Stock values affect individual wealth and especially gifts for capital purposes, which are often made as securities, according to the council. That boon also affected endowment levels, which have investment returns that are influenced by the markets. At the 959 institutions that gave data about their endowments, the total value of endowments increased by 15 percent.

Top Fund-Raisers in 2014

Institution	Raised in 2014
1. Harvard U.	$1.16 billion
2. Stanford U.	$929 million
3. U. of Southern California	$732 million
4. Northwestern U.	$616 million
5. Johns Hopkins U.	$615 million
6. Cornell U.	$546 million
7. U. of Texas at Austin	$529 million
8. U. of Pennsylvania	$484 million
9. U. of Washington	$478 million
10. Columbia U.	$470 million
11. New York U.	$456 million
12. U. of California at San Francisco	$445 million
13. Duke U.	$437 million
14. U. of Michigan	$433 million
15. Yale U.	$430.31 million
16. U. of California at Los Angeles	$430.28 million
17. U. of Chicago	$405 million
18. U of California at Berkeley	$390 million
19. Massachusetts Institute of Technology	$375 million
20. Indiana U.	$341 million