<p>The number that goes in the bank has to count too.</p>
<ol>
<li>U. of Wisconsin at Madison $325,336,779</li>
</ol>
<p>corbett, are you a student at any of those places? If not, don't talk about how students feel. I can't speak for Harvard students (and I also think its dangerous to treat Harvard and Yale as a single type, rather than Princeton and Yale, which are probably more similar), but I can assure you that Yale undergrads certainly feel like the school exists for us.
Now I might well not give to Yale after I graduate, but that isn't because I don't absolutely love the school or because I don't feel ownership of it as a student (in fact, those things may push me to donate against my better judgment). It's more because I'm not sure giving a bunch of (mostly) fairly well-off students even better amenities is the best use of one's charitable donations.</p>
<p>Yale and Princeton have roughly the same undergrad size. Yale, of course, has more grad students, but in this case I don't think it detracts from undergrad quality at all.</p>
<p>
[quote]
and the undergrads greatly outnumber the graduate and professional students, by about 2.5 to 1.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>At Berkeley, undergrads outnumber grads by about 2.5:1--does that mean Berkeley's more undergrad-focused than schools like Stanford with ratios more like 1:2?</p>
<p>
[quote]
It's more because I'm not sure giving a bunch of (mostly) fairly well-off students even better amenities is the best use of one's charitable donations.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Agreed. I daresay I'll probably donate little if anything to Stanford after graduation, since I see many more worthy organizations who are not quite so financially rich (QuestBridge, for example).</p>
<p>
[quote]
corbett, are you a student at any of those places? If not, don't talk about how students feel.
[/quote]
I was talking about how <em>I</em> feel !! I already admitted that this is totally subjective.</p>
<p>
[quote]
At Berkeley, undergrads outnumber grads by about 2.5:1--does that mean Berkeley's more undergrad-focused than schools like Stanford with ratios more like 1:2?
[/quote]
No, obviously not. My guess is that a school has to have a small total enrollment, as well as a high undergrad:graduate ratio, to develop a strong sense of undergraduate "ownership" and loyalty. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Now I might well not give to Yale after I graduate, but that isn't because I don't absolutely love the school or because I don't feel ownership of it as a student (in fact, those things may push me to donate against my better judgment). It's more because I'm not sure giving a bunch of (mostly) fairly well-off students even better amenities is the best use of one's charitable donations.
[/quote]
[quote]
Agreed. I daresay I'll probably donate little if anything to Stanford after graduation, since I see many more worthy organizations who are not quite so financially rich
[/quote]
That's perfectly understandable. But it still doesn't explain why Princeton or Dartmouth alumni seem to feel differently.</p>
<p>In particular, these points don't seem applicable to the case of Princeton -- after all, Princeton is even wealthier, on an endowment-per-student basis, than Yale or Stanford, yet it has a significantly higher alumni giving rate. I have simply offered a possible explanation for this phenomenon. If anyone has a better one, let's hear it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You're absolutely right. I didn't go far enough down the rankings. Also left out Scripps College. Also Webb Institute (NY), listed in US News under "unranked specialty schools, engineering" which tops 'em all at a whopping 75% alumni giving rate. Also Indiana Institute of Technology, listed in US News under "unranked specialty schools, business" which ties Carleton for the number two spot, and Beacon College (FL), listed in US News under "liberal arts colleges, unranked", which ties Princeton for number five.</p>
<p>Top 10:</p>
<ol>
<li>Webb Institute 75%</li>
<li>Carleton 64%</li>
<li>Indiana Institute of Technology 64%</li>
<li>Amherst 61%</li>
<li>Princeton 60%</li>
<li>Beacon College 60%</li>
<li>Centre College 59% </li>
<li>Williams 58%</li>
<li>Middlebury 57%</li>
<li>Scripps 57%</li>
</ol>
<p>US News lists at least 43 LACs, baccalaureate colleges, and specialty colleges with alumni giving rates higher than Harvard's.</p>
<p>All of this says to me that there's a much weaker correlation between alumni giving rate and academic quality as conventionally understood than some people might imagine.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Also Webb Institute (NY), listed in US News under "unranked specialty schools, engineering" which tops 'em all at a whopping 75% alumni giving rate.
[/quote]
Not a surprise since they give full tuition scholarships to all its students.</p>
<p>
[quote]
All of this says to me that there's a much weaker correlation between alumni giving rate and academic quality as conventionally understood than some people might imagine.
[/quote]
According to US News, alumni giving rate is included as a factor in their rankings because it is "an indirect measure of student satisfaction." If this is true, then it does seem like a factor that is worth considering when selecting a school. </p>
<p>As with any single factor, it isn't perfect. It seems likely, for example, public schools will typically have lower giving rates than comparable private schools. It also seems possible that schools noted for unusual academic rigor and/or lack of fun might have unusually low giving rates (Caltech, which was discussed earlier in this thread, seems like a possible example). </p>
<p>But it also seems like a school with unusually high giving rates must have some unusually satisifed students. And it seems reasonable to reward such schools.</p>
<p>Does alumni giving rate actually reflect student satisfaction? Schools do internal evaluations of student satisfaction, but the results are not usually made public. However, [url=<a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Eoir/pdfs/DartmouthSeniorSurvey_2006.pdf%5DDartmouth%5B/url">http://www.dartmouth.edu/~oir/pdfs/DartmouthSeniorSurvey_2006.pdf]Dartmouth[/url</a>] has posted the results of one such survey, where Dartmouth was compared to three general "Peer Groups":</p>
<p>Peer Group 1: highly selective, co-ed liberal arts colleges
Peer Group 2: highly selective, private universities in Northeast
Peer Group 3: highly selective, private universities beyond Northeast</p>
<p>The results are very consistent with those expected from alumni giving rates:</p>
<p>Peer Group 1: 56% "Very Satisfied"
Dartmouth: 48 % "Very Satisfied"
Peer Groups 2 and 3: 39 % and 37 % "Very Satisfied"</p>
<p>^ Cooper Union (listed in US News as #1 under the category "Baccalaureate Colleges, North") also gives full-tuition scholarships to all students, but their alumni giving rate is only 31%. Go figure.</p>
<p>
[quote]
^ Cooper Union (listed in US News as #1 under the category "Baccalaureate Colleges, North") also gives full-tuition scholarships to all students, but their alumni giving rate is only 31%. Go figure.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Haha, my alma mater. I'm happy to say that I'm part of that 31%, lol. </p>
<p>Anyway, my theory is that a high giving rate necessarily means satisfaction, while a low rate does not necessarily mean dissatisfaction. Otherwise, I can't explain the large disparities between similar schools.</p>
<p>Top 10 USN&WR LACs, alumni giving rate:</p>
<p>64 % Carleton
61 % Amherst
58 % Williams
57 % Middlebury
55 % Bowdoin
54 % Davidson
51 % Swarthmore
50 % Wellesley
47 % Pomona
47 % Haverford</p>
<p>Thanks for giving the LAC data, too! I don't know how much it helps, but it DOES help people actually see that these colleges exist.</p>
<p>I'm going to have to track down these earlier posts (parts 1-4). these look as though they would be worthwhile to read.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the work involved.</p>
<p>LiketoPlayWoW. Start a thread about that. You'll get plenty of action on it I'm sure. :-)</p>
<p>Student satisfaction is a funny thing and it's challenging to measure. </p>
<p>I always keep in mind a survey I got back once, where a senior griped about every single thing we asked about specifically. But the final question was something like "overall experience" or "would you attend here again" and their answer was unequivocally, superlatively positive. And the student themselves wrote in "GO FIGURE!" by that response. It's a reminder to me that sometimes students can express a number of criticisms of an institution, and still think it's a great place to be a student. I think it's the nature of the beast, maybe. Students are on their own for the first time, and they are 24/7 consumers of an expensive, complex "product" known as a college education. Students seem to have strong opinions about how things should be run and its not uncommon for them to think they should be run differently. So if you probe student "satisfaction," it's easy to get critical, negative responses. Whether they reflect a poor undergraduate environment or not is another question, and something prospective students be careful about misinterpreting.</p>
<p>Anyway, I'm moving well beyond the original post. Maybe alumni giving is a decent proxy. I certainly am impressed by a school with a high giving rate. But as others have pointed out, there are a number of factors that influence alumni participation in giving, and they aren't all wholly reflective of undergraduate satisfaction.</p>
<p>I actually think it's a rather poor proxy for student satisfaction for the reasons I stated earlier. First, overall alumni giving may be related to the current satisfaction of people who graduated over the course of several decades; but this is at best tenuously related to how satisfied recent graduates are (and is not even necessarily reflective of how satisfied those same people were at the time they attended the institution, since perceptions can change substantially over time for all sorts of reasons). On the other hand, if we tried to measure giving rates among recent graduates we'd face a lot of other confounding factors: recent graduates unable to contribute because they're attending graduate or professional schools, doing low-wage public service work, or struggling to pay off big college debts, etc. </p>
<p>Second, there's no way to control for the wide disparities in institutional effort at soliciting alumni contributions. Some schools have enormous "development" staffs and equally enormous budgets for lavish parties and other social events in far-flung locations; the net cash benefit to the institution's coffers from the alumni giving at such events may be modest, but of course it ups the giving rate (and pays off in US News rankings). Most publics, in particular, have not historically relied on alumni giving and are only now beginning to gear up in this area; nor are their alumni accustomed to giving or to being solicited for contributions. The difference in effort, and whether the school is seeking to maximize the net value of contributions or instead is seeking to maximize the total number of contributions, will make an enormous difference in how the overall alumni giving rate comes out; and this is completely independent of alumni satisfaction.</p>
<p>Can anybody tell me exactly how the alumni giving rate is calculated? Is it weighted towards recent graduates? Or contributions in recent years? Only in the past year? I'm looking for the formula to be precise.</p>
<p>The 2008 Edition of USN&WR, p. 79, says the following (and only the following) about this factor:
[quote]
Alumni giving rate (5 percent). The average percentage of living alumni who gave to their schools during 2004-05 and 2005-06 is an indirect measure of student satisfaction.
[/quote]
So it does not appear to be weighted towards recent graduates. It appears to be an average of rates from all living graduates, based upon two recent years.</p>
<p>Yeah. So it's a little like asking everyone who's ever bought a Ford in their lifetime what they thought of their Ford, and then saying this is an "indirect measure" of current customer satisfaction with Ford's current product line.</p>
<p>Or perhaps more accurately, like asking each auto manufacturer to do its own survey of all its previous customers, and then calculating the number of positive responses they get as a percentage of all their previous customers. Those companies that have kept the best track of their previous customers over the years, communicated with them regularly, and make the greatest effort to solicit responses will naturally get the highest response rate and the highest number of positive responses. And this is supposed to tell us something about customer satisfaction with the current product? I don't think so.</p>
<p>bclintonk wrote:</p>
<br>
<p>Second, there's no way to control for the wide disparities in institutional effort at soliciting alumni contributions. Some schools have enormous "development" staffs and equally enormous budgets for lavish parties and other social events in far-flung locations; the net cash benefit to the institution's coffers from the alumni giving at such events may be modest, but of course it ups the giving rate (and pays off in US News rankings). <</p>
<br>
<p>OTOH, let's take a school like Scripps: <900 students, half of whom probably settle within 50 mi of campus. Wouldn't take a huge number of fly-ins to goose the numbers.</p>
<p>While I don't think the Alumni Giving stat belongs in the rankings methodology, I have no problem with the fact that it is measured and even less problem with the fact that some schools make a large commitment to getting high participation levels. I'm not sure why one would criticize schools for doing this as many were doing it well before the USNWR rankings came along and I suspect that they and many others would still be doing it even if this were dropped from the rankings. </p>
<p>Money at colleges is a big deal and the ability of a college to connect with its students in such a way as they are willing to make annual gifts 5, 10, 20, even 50 years after their graduation says a lot about a school. Notre Dame does an extraordinary job with this and I think their success like that at Princeton, Duke and Dartmouth (and Georgia Tech, U Virginia and W&M among the publics) should be applauded rather than disdained. Their connection with their alumni is a strong selling point for these schools as you rarely encounter a dissatisfied former student from any of these colleges.</p>