Trends Show Outside Support Declines

The "difficult and volatile period in the history of world capital markets" lamented in this year's Financial Report to the Board of Overseers is surely giving Harvard financial planners an uneasy sense of the future.

What is most apparent in this year's report is that the 1960s heyday of government and foundation support to private universities is definitely over, and that pressures are now upon other components within the University to derive adequate monetary support.

Although government support grants to the University increased by 5.4 per cent to $66.2 million in the past fiscal year, the total share of income reimbursed to the University dropped by 26.2 per cent.

And the Financial report says that the "most severe decline in the real income [funding to the University] last year was in government support, where the cumulative decrease over five years has been 28 per cent.

This decline in government support is matched by a similar decline in foundational gifts to the University. In the past fiscal year, gifts for current use from foundations have dropped by more than 28 per cent, indicating the financial strains on philanthropic foundations which had many of their assets depleted in the 1974 depressed stock market.

Combined with this drop in government and foundational support is a reduction in the level of corporate funding. In the past fiscal year the combined foundational and corporate support dropped from $14.8 million in 1973-74 to $6.3 million in 1974-75.

The decline of these past avenues of support has placed pressures on other financial resources of the University.

Third

Hale Champion, financial vice president, said yesterday that tuition and fees now provide around 30 per cent of the overall university budget.

The financial report says that "alumni gifts were particularly important in sustaining an overall level of capital gifts." While alumni gifts totaled 38 per cent of the 1973-74 total gifts of capital, they represented 57 per cent of the total in 1974-75.

The Faculty has continued to be the main obstacle in balancing the overall University budget. The total University deficit has consistently been equal to or less than the Faculty budget, and Champion said yesterday that when the Faculty budget breaks even, which Dean Rosovsky says it will in 1976-77 the University almost definitely will.

The 1960s eruption in outside support to the University is over. The University, which must rely more than ever upon alumni donations, student fees, and belt tightening measures to stay financially sound, is now looking inward once again to the solution of its financial difficulties.