“Forbes has a simple alternative ROI measure called the Grateful Graduates Index which ranks colleges by the median amount of private donations per student over a 10-year period. The idea is that the best colleges are the ones that produce successful people who make enough money during their careers to be charitable, and feel compelled to give back to their Alma mater.”
Here’s the link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2015/07/29/top-50-roi-colleges-2015-grateful-grads-index/
Check out the median amount for MIT and Caltech; fewer give, but those that do really give.
We are an exceptionally grateful MIT family as we have paid very little for our son’s education. I hope he’ll give back one day.
Wow, little Caltech has some generous givers, yet I’ve never heard of any one BIG contribution.
Sbjdorlo, I’m sure your son will contribute, even if only $10 a year . He and MIT seem like a good match.
“yet I’ve never heard of any one BIG contribution.”
you never heard about Gordon Moore’s [ Moore’s Law] $600 million donation??
“In 2001, Moore and his wife donated $600 million to Caltech, the largest gift EVER to an institution of higher education”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Moore
I was glad to see Berea on the list.
@menloparkmom those amounts are mind boggling @-)
Perhaps the ROI in question is from the colleges’ point of view.
Color me skeptical. US News says Harvard’s “average alumni giving rate” is 35.1%. Forbes says Harvard’s “average alumni participation rate” is 19%. These figures are so wildly at odds that they seem impossible to reconcile, until one notices that Forbes defines “participate” as “giving annually.” So does this mean the Harvard alum who gives generously in even-numbered years but gives nothing in odd-numbered years in deference to his Yale-educated spouse who makes similarly lavish contributions to her alma mater out of jointly owned funds in the odd years is counted in the US News data, but not in the Forbes data? Or worse, is lumped by Forbes into the category of “ungrateful alum” because he doesn’t give each and every year? I don’t know the answer to this, but if someone has a better explanation, I’d like to hear it.
I’m generally skeptical of alumni giving as a metric of anything. First, the average size of the donation could be as much a function of inherited wealth as of anything the alum got out of college. A school that admits and graduates a high percentage of 1%-ers is likely to have higher average donations than a school that serves a less wealthy clientele. That doesn’t make the first school a better school, or say anything about how grateful the alumni are, nor does it say anything about how much the school contributed to enhancing its alumni’s earning potential The 1%-ers, after all, could be merely looking for a respectable job while they continue to live primarily off dividends, interest, capital gains, and trust fund distributions, with a higher-than-average need for charitable deductions which they can get by contributing to the old alma mater. And a high percentage of alumni giving is IMO more a reflection of the effectiveness and persistence of the school’s alumni fundraising efforts, and also perhaps of the net worth of its alumni base regardless of whether that wealth was inherited or earned, than it is an indicator of spontaneous gratitude on the part of alumni, or of anything the school did to enhance the alum’s earning power.
@bclintonk it looks like they factored in for that variable: “In order to level the playing field for colleges that produce lots of grateful grads in lower paying fields like education, academia or government service, we also factor in 3-year alumni participation rates, which show the percentage of alumni who donate each year regardless of the amount. In other word, we let alumni dollars and devotion determine successful college outcomes.”
I mean who knows? I thought it was just another perspective to take into account. Could mean nothing at all but I do tend to agree with this anecdotally speaking, “It would appear that colleges with smaller class sizes and more intimate educational experiences are a key factor in producing successful happy alums.” I hated my big school Cal State Long Beach and couldn’t wait to be done. OTH my kids love their small schools.
@bclintonk, as you yourself noted elsewhere, the USNews data is self-reported, and I certainly wouldn’t expect schools to under-report their alumni donation rates while I wouldn’t be surprised if some/many exaggerate or massage the data to make that rate look higher.
Well, right. Which just means their ranking is a function of both factors–“participation” (= % who contribute annually for at least 3 consecutive years) and average contribution over a 10-year period. That doesn’t exactly “level the playing field for colleges that produce lots of grateful grads in lower paying fields,” because in order to rank high, they still need average contributions to be large. And it completely ignores the “endowment effect,” i.e., people born into wealth will have more money to contribute, and more tax-driven incentive to contribute, even if they don’t end up in high-paying careers. Your citation is helpful in answering my question, however. The Harvard grad who contributes only in even-numbered years isn’t counted in the “participation” score.
Just to be clear: I’m not taking the US News figures as the gold standard. Those figures are inherently suspect because they are self-reported, and colleges have an incentive to “massage” the numbers. But I am equally skeptical of the Forbes numbers, unless they disclose the steps they took to verify the accuracy of the reported figures. And even if accurate, I question whether they mean anything. Do we really think an alum who donates a modest amount every year for 3 consecutive years can be deemed “more grateful” than an otherwise similarly situated alum who donates equivalent or even larger amounts in toto, but does so more sporadically? That strikes me as a pretty bizarre theory.