Harvard Second In Fundraising

Harvard finished second to Stanford in fundraising this fiscal year, according to an annual survey published by the Council for Aid to Education (CAE), raising $614 million dollars. Cardinal out-raised Crimson by over $200 million dollars.

The University of Southern California, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University rounded out the top five institutions. In total, American institutions of higher education received nearly $30 billion in donations, an increase of 6.3 percent over the previous year.

The 20 institutions with the highest levels of fundraising account for nearly a third of that increase, about $518 million. These schools raised over $7.5 billion, representing a quarter of total donations.

Harvard officials expressed satisfaction with their fundraising totals, predicting that the University would raise a similar amount during the upcoming year.

“Harvard is very grateful to the many alumni and friends who made gifts to the University last year and in the preceding years,” a spokesperson for the Harvard Development Office wrote in an e-mail.

Unlike Stanford, Harvard is not currently running a capital campaign. University President Drew G. Faust has said she intends to lead one while in office, but the development spokesperson said that there is no timetable yet for when the campaign will begin.

Martin Shell, Stanford’s vice president for development, attributed the strong fundraising numbers to high levels of participation by Stanford alumni, pointing to nearly 70,000 donors who contributed to Stanford’s current capital campaign.

“We believe the depth of this support is because our donors see Stanford as a way to address the root causes of global problems over the long term,” Shell said in a press release. “Our faculty members are conducting groundbreaking research and we are educating students who become leaders in many fields.”

As part of the capital campaign, which was launched in Oct. 2006, Stanford hopes to raise $4.3 billion, and the effects of the campaign contributed heavily to Stanford’s fundraising numbers, the authors of the survey said.

Although universities raised more this year than last year, the participation of alumni nationwide dipped slightly from 11.9 percent in 2006 to 11.7 percent this year. The survey authors attributed this to an increase in the sizes of recent alumni classes and the lack of a comparable increase in the number of donors for recent classes.

Another noteworthy fact from the survey was a steep decline in fundraising at Yale. The school saw donations drop by 9.7 percent from 2006 to 2007, which resulted in a drop from third to eighth place.

“The decline in cash receipts is primarily related to timing of payments of large pledges,” Inge T. Reichenbach, Yale’s vice president of development, wrote in an e-mail.

“We track two sets of numbers: Campaign commitments (counting both pledges and new gifts) and cash figures (counting only cash, but including cash received on pledges that predate the Campaign),” she wrote. “Our Campaign numbers continue to run a year ahead of schedule as I mentioned, and the cash number was a timing issue as indicated by a significant increase in our cash totals year-to-date compared to last year.

—Staff writer Prateek Kumar can be reached at kumar@fas.harvard.edu.