Maryland colleges and universities ended a strong fundraising year with a pair of billion-dollar campaign announcements from the University of Maryland, College Park and the Johns Hopkins University, and a flurry of major gifts that included $50 million to Hopkins and $5 million to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
But in addition to sharing seven figures, the gifts making headlines in recent months had something else in common: Virtually all were made by friends and foundations, not former students of the receiving institution.
While alumni gifts still form the largest chunk of voluntary giving to higher education - and overall dollars contributed are increasing - the percentage of students giving back to old Alma Mater has been trending downward in recent years, a phenomenon that has college fundraisers worried about the future, even as they celebrate the current good times.
"All over the country, the percentage of alumni giving has dropped, and it's a concern among all institutions except maybe for the very elite," said Sheldon Caplis, vice president for institutional advancement at UMBC.
In response, public and private campuses alike are trying to forge stronger bonds with alumni and habituate younger ones to annual-fund giving.
Initiatives range from manufacturing on-campus traditions designed to become nostalgic touchstones for future appeals, to using peer-to-peer online networks such as MySpace and Facebook.com for communication with a new generation of alumni who frequently don't have land-based phones and are resistant to traditional fundraising methods.
Though the overwhelming majority of alumni dollars comes by way of major gifts from wealthy donors, the relatively small contributions made by rank-and-file alumni are highly prized because they are less likely to be restricted to a particular use.
Alumni-giving rates of those with bachelor's degrees are also considered indicators of student satisfaction, and factor into influential rankings such as those produced by U.S. News and World Report.
Nationwide, the percentage of all alumni giving money to their former campuses - including those with graduate degrees and transfers or drop-outs - was 12.4 percent in 2005, "representing a slow, continuous decline from 2002, when it was 13.4 percent," according to the 2006 annual survey of college fundraising published by the New York-based Council for Aid to Education.
