As noted above, the vast majority of alumni do not make donations of any size, small or large, so most students don’t seem to succumb to this peer pressure or need to appear on a list of high-tier donors. I’ve never seen a comparison of donation rates/amounts between students from high income families vs low income families. However, my suspicion is that kids from high income families would have higher donation rates than kids from low income families due to growing up in an environment where making financial donations was more common including among family, friends, members of community, etc.
The Chetty study suggests that kids from lower income families average lower income than most students after graduating, but only by relatively small amounts at typical highly selective private colleges. I’ll use Stanford as an example this time, rather than Harvard. The average Stanford grad had a 77th percentile income at age 34, while kids from lower income families at Stanford had an average 74th percentile income at age 34. I’d expect this small of a difference in income to have little direct impact on donation rates.
As mentioned earlier in the thread, I came from a ~median income family. Today I’d get a near full ride, but when I attended it was instead a large FA package. I never felt shame or guilt about the size of the FA package, nor pressure to make a large donation after graduating. As noted above, I do get regular emails about making small (such as $5) donations to Stanford Fund, which I assume is similar to all grads who have registered email. I received one just last week. I also sometimes get donations mailings related to specific ECs I was involved in, particularly the crew team. However, I consider these spam, similar to the numerous other non-college mailings I get requesting donations. I feel more pressure when the cashier at the supermarket asks me if I’d like to donate to a fund than I do from these college mailings, due to the more personal nature of the interaction (have to tell cashier no vs simply not respond back to email).
But @elf1 ALL alums get the same mailings, with the same tacit view that a large donation is better! How can it therefore be a subtle mechanism to put people in their place? Unless the university wants to do that to all its alums?
Look these are very big businesses with a need to raise money. They have zero incentive to send subtle messages about alums’ places in society. They have huge incentives to raise as much money as possible. That is all. I expect other alums who are not making a ton of money but who got no financial aid might also notice a tilt towards expecting a large donation.
Unlike @Data10 s example of the $5 donation, I remember Stanford’s questionaire about whether any of us had started a company. I had – a farm (uh clearly not what Stanford had intended!) – so I filled the questionnaire out. Stanford was obviously looking to learn about valuable tech companies. Did I love it? No. But do I think it had anything to do with me, or sending a message to me? Absolutely not. It had to do with Stanford wanting to ID the richest alums so they could raise the most money possible. Possibly so they could continue to offer great financial aid
Regardless of the intent of the alma mater requesting donations, @elf1 is getting the message that
I wonder how many other low SES alumni feel the same way. I get calls from my state flagship alma mater. I refuse to donate even $5 because I’ll still be paying my loans while simultaneously trying to pay for my own child’s college. I had a great experience for super cheap and I got great financial aid there but I don’t feel guilty. I use the call to have (truly) nice conversations with whatever poor students are trying to pay their bills by working in the call center. In-state tuition is currently $10K and plenty of low SES folks attend.
Not trying to derail the thread with donation discussion, but I might perceive different intent from my alma mater were they elite with a huge endowment. Or, I might perceive different intent had I felt like a bit of an outsider during my time there.
Sometimes saying “I didn’t mean any ill intent” doesn’t help all that much to the person who has felt hurt. I’m speculating here, but it may not be about the donation request, but about the request on top of a bunch of other things. I have never been in the position of attending a wealthy school as a low-SES person. But I am interested in hearing the experiences of those who have.
So is it preferable if colleges only solicit alums whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower? Or only solicit alums living in Atherton and Palo Alto? Or only solicit alums on the Forbes 400 list?
Jeez, you guys really take direct mail hatred to a new level! Colleges solicit every alum. You don’t want to give? Throw it out. But to assume that you were admitted 20 years ago (or 30 years ago, or 50 years ago) because of your giving potential down the road?
WAY too much thinking going on! I don’t get mailings from the local BMW dealer because they think “Jeez, maybe Blossom is tired of driving a junker Honda; she has saved so much money on transportation for the last 40 years we bet she’s ready to trade up”.
No. They mail me because my neighborhood (mixed, some affluent, some not) is adjacent to a fancier neighborhood (mostly affluent and some sitting in a neighborhood which has minimum lot requirements so there are some true McMansions) and it’s too time intensive with low ROI to individually go through the zip code (which we share) and figure out who is an up and comer who wants a BMW and who does not. So everyone gets.
I think you raise a great point and a controversial one that is easy to get derailed by a debate about alumni contributions. Dartmouth and yale are the only Ivy League schools that approach 50% alumni participation on a regular basis. But they may be the exceptions that prove the rule: wealthy LACs do exert a great deal of peer-pressure to “give back” to their alma mater and I can attest as a FGLI alum to the enormous - I call it gratitude, you may call it “guilt” - for everything that was given to me without strings attached when I was an undergrad at a wealthy LAC. I think Wesleyan’s approach, which is to encourage a robust student culture separate and distinct from the administration, allows for priorities to percolate from “the bottom up” instead of the top down and helps mitigate that feeling that everything is being handed to one “on a silver platter.”
I never felt a scintilla of guilt about financial aid; never felt any peer pressure about giving to the annual fund; never felt that I was admitted for PR purposes.
I HAVE given back- not just monetarily, but also as a volunteer mentor/career coach to students, volunteer for initiatives that focus on women’s educational and professional issues; volunteer for several affinity groups that meant a lot to mean when I was a student. But not out of guilt-- and not even out of gratitude (although that’s still there)- but because I believe it’s what you do to make a better community.
If there was a quid pro quo- we’re giving you financial aid and you’d better appreciate it, and pay us back- I never felt it. And still don’t feel it. I can help mentor FGLI students because I know from experience they don’t have the social capital to understand the corporate world (I seriously thought that someone’s parent who was a banker was a bank teller-- or maybe a branch manager). That’s not guilt or payback for my aid- that’s me trying to help in the best way I can. I explained to a FGLI student a few years ago (pre-covid) who did not have enough money to pay for a plane ticket to fly to an out of state interview, and didn’t know how he was going to pay for a hotel room since he didn’t have a credit card-- that the company would be BUYING him a plane ticket and pre-paying his hotel room-- and he was astonished. He was prepared to turn down the interview invitation since he had never heard that employers would pre-pay interview expenses.
Why not turn all this anger about how asking for help must make FGLI students feel diminished and offended and it’s all just a PR stunt-- and actually volunteer to help???
I cannot imagine viewing the alumni appeal as peer pressure. I have a classmate who was the first 7 figure gift from my class. My friend group was thrilled to learn of his success AND generosity-- but what did that have to do with us?
Ah, perhaps this makes a difference. All the FGLI folks I know who went to wealthy elite schools went to universities. I’ve no knowledge of comparable LACs.
Neither I nor any low SES person I know ever felt guilt or shame for receiving financial aid, nor received any pressure to donate later, especially as payback for the school having deigned to let us attend. But if I had gotten that sort of impression, I would have been very turned off (to phrase it politely) and firmly resolved to never give a penny. Double or quadruple that if it were a wealthy elite school.
Well, back when dinosaurs still roamed, we were all treated to the same remonstrance, that “No one here is paying the full cost of their education.” You don’t hear that so much anymore.
Choate’s annual operating budget is ~$65 million while its endowment is below $500 million (much lower than its peer schools). Every stamp helps! The school keeps buying adjacent campus homes that are older and expensive to maintain not to mention Choate is building brand new faculty homes that look fairly expensive. It seems alums have been generous in giving the school beautiful state-of-the art buildings but not the funds to maintain them.
Fyi usually schools won’t accept gifts unless they’ve already raised an endowment for maintenance. I have to believe Choate’s CFO wouldn’t diverge from this standard practice.
Doing a quick search shows there are many studies relating to predicting alumni giving, which makes sense considering that colleges have access to both detailed alumni surveys and amount given by alumni. A relevant one is at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775712000775 which review whether increased financial aid increases alumni donations and is quoted below:
Students who received scholarships are also less likely to be in the top 10 percent of givers in their class in a given year. Again, we find no evidence of income effects, i.e., that undergraduates who received scholarships give less because they have relatively low incomes as adults. One possible explanation is that scholarship recipients prefer to give to charities other than their alma mater .
Rather than receiving scholarships/FA grants, other studies found things like the following had a noteworthy correlation with increased giving – reports high rate of satisfaction with college experience, graduated with high GPA, involved in many ECs during college, involved in alumni organization, and no student loan debt. Some of the prior comments in this thread make it sounds like some lower income kids feel out of place, which could result in lower averages of the categories above, and could contribute to the study observations with seemingly reduced giving.
Students from low income families may have more financial obligations starting with student loan debt. They may also need to support or assist financially parents or other relatives. Hence, they may have less money left to donate to their colleges after graduation.
I don’t think there’s a huge mystery here. Here’s a list of 200 of the best-known colleges and universities in the country. I doubt if more than 10 of them have an alumni giving rate of more than 40%; at the overwhelming majority, a 20% rate would be a banner year of gift-giving. IMHO, it’s against human nature to give money for a service you’ve already “paid” for and that’s just as true for the rich as it is for the poor:
I would hope not. We send our daughter to college to not only get an education, but to also learn the value of sacrifice and the self-respect gained from supporting herself from her own hard work.
There was a part in “Excellent Sheep” where the author talked about the jobs kids with Yale degrees tend to think are beneath their piece of parchment (while chasing consulting and IB gigs). I know this isn’t quite the same thing, but it’s related. A dear friend was quite upset that her kid wanted to teach elementary school after getting his HYPS degree. The thought was “so many doors are open to them - why choose one that’s pretty much open to everyone?” I think there’s an element of that at highly selective schools that affects everyone from every walk of life.
