Yale’s Alumni Giving Hits New Record

Dean Edward “Ted” Snyder

YALE’S RECORD GREW ITS ‘EFFECTIVE ENDOWMENT’ BY $60 MILLION

Snyder says he measures alumni giving in terms of “effective endowment,” an admittedly “nerdy way” to look at annual fund raising. A school with an endowment of $200 million typically generates a 5% return, or $10 million, that it can spend, for example. If the school raised $1 million in unrestricted funds in a year, it would therefore have $11 million to spend, or an effective endowment of $220 million, a 10% increase.

“When you think about where Yale SOM is relative to all these other schools and it’s a mix actually,” says Snyder. “We have a relatively small population of alumni so that hurts us. We have a young school so people are not of the wealthy types. Our sense is if we make a push now and try to build up alumni giving not only would it yield benefits right now but it’s important for the school going forward. Going back to effective endowment, we finished last year at $691 million. If I take the $3 million fund we raised this year, that’s like an extra $60 million in endowment, or a 9% increase.”

Stanford and Harvard, on the other hand, are in double digits, acknowledges Snyder. For Stanford, the effective endowment goes from $1.1 million to $1.4 million, a 28% increase. For Harvard, the effective endowment goes from $3.2 billion to nearly $3.8 billion, nearly an 18% increase. “If you take your dynamic duo at the top, it shows you how strong they are because of the delta on their alumni giving,” says Snyder. “Stanford might be the one that really stands out.”

ALUMNI COUPLES HAD A GIVING RATE OF 75%

Getz says that of the alumni who had contributed to the fund last year, some 86% were retained. Of alums who had given in the prior three or four years, 43% of them came back. And of alumni who hadn’t given to the annual fund in five or more years, 22% of them came back into the fold and gave 11% of the total dollars. “These were people who hadn’t been engaged or supportive in recent years,” he says. Another fun stat: When a couple are both alums of the school, the participation rate is 75%. “Love was a good thing here obviously,” laughs Getz.

How much higher can it get? “Tuck is the leader and has been and I would love to say we will catch them but I can’t honestly say it,” says Getz. “They have set a remarkable bar at 70% and Dartmouth as a whole is at 43%. They have done extraordinarily well.”

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