HEC Paris Raises Over €213 Million, The Most Ever By A French School

HEC Paris today concludes its five-year fundraising campaign having raised more money than any French institution of higher learning in history — an important milestone for an independent business school that is not attached to a larger university system.

The elite business school raised more than €213 million through the “Impact Tomorrow” campaign that began in June 2019, easily eclipsing its €200 million goal and doubling the total of the school’s previous fundraising effort in 2013. The massive influx of funds will allow HEC Paris to consolidate its independent financing model while continuing to pioneer cutting-edge business educational curricula.

The funds have already begun transforming the school, financing a host of scholarship and diversification initiatives. More than 5,000 students — over 1,000 per year for every year of the campaign — have already benefited from scholarships, mentoring, and coaching programs.

CAMPAIGN HAS CONSOLIDATED HEC PARIS’S ROLE AS AN ‘IMPACT PLATFORM’

The benefits to current and future students from the success of Impact Tomorrow will only grow with time, says Delphine Colson, director of the HEC Foundation.

“Students will benefit from this campaign through different ways: on one hand, through the opportunity to study on a uniquely diverse campus (with 135 nationalities represented), supported by our excellent scholarships programs; on the other hand, through the quality and variety of the programs offered to them,” Colson tells Poets&Quants. “The school has developed new academic content and thoroughly revised its curriculum to enable students to become true solution-makers to our contemporary challenges.”

She cites as an example the creation of Hi !PARIS, a center for artificial intelligence in business and society, with Institut Polytechnique de Paris. The new center “significantly enhanced our ability to support students in their entrepreneurial ventures and provided substantial support for research,” Colson says. “This allows HEC Paris to continue delivering the highest standards of education across all its programs.”

Adds Eloïc Peyrache, HEC Paris dean and CEO: “The ‘Impact Tomorrow’ campaign has consolidated HEC Paris’s role as an impact platform in three ways: It has strengthened equal opportunities, transformed our teaching programs and supported innovation and social entrepreneurship. It has been instrumental in changing lives, creating new opportunities and equipping our students with the tools they need to tackle the challenges of tomorrow. These donations are vital for transforming our school and building its capacity to navigate the huge changes the world is going through.”

INTERNATIONAL DONATIONS ACCOUNT FOR 30% OF CONTRIBUTIONS

According to a news release from the HEC Foundation, the fundraising campaign’s haul “has already been invested in pursuit of HEC’s public-interest mission, financing equal opportunities, education programs and research as well as to step up HEC’s transformation process.” The foundation credits the success of the campaign to contributions made by almost 6,000 donors and major donors, whose numbers have increased two-fold. Among the notable benefactors: French businessman Philippe Foriel-Destezet, the founder of Adecco who passed away in 2021, is the largest single donor to the foundation. In addition, 53 corporate sponsors have rallied to give their backing to the school, representing 40% of the total amount.

The profile of donors includes not just foundations and HEC graduates of all generations “but also a growing number of non-alumni driven by the desire to support a higher education institute with HEC Paris’s impact capacity,” the foundation writes. Likewise, university chairs, which have traditionally been funded by private companies, are now also backed by private benefactors. The share of international donations is on the rise, too, today accounting for 30% of contributions.”

Among the already-felt impacts of Impact Tomorrow:

• The Prép’Etoile program has seen its scholarship students in preparatory classes double, jumping from 280 in 2018 to 580 in 2024. Additionally, 2,339 academic excellence scholarships have been awarded to attract top talent from around the world to HEC Paris.
• Patrons have funded such international scholarship programs as the HEC Imagine Fellowship for students from war-torn countries; the Laidlaw Scholarship for facilitating access to the MBA program for disadvantaged women; the CMA CGM Excellence Fund for Lebanon; and PACT Afrique, which helps prepare young African students for HEC Paris.
• One of the major initiatives of this campaign was the creation by the School of an HEC Paris House in the heart of London. This space hosts events, academic programs, and serves as a hub for our HEC community in the United Kingdom, while also providing a valuable resource and networking platform for HEC alumni from around the world passing through London.
• The campaign has helped develop HEC Paris’s centers and institutes of expertise, such as the Sustainability and Organizations Institute, the Hi! PARIS Center, and the Paris Innovation & Entrepreneurship Institute.
• Research has also benefited from “Impact tomorrow”: 20% of research topics and 50% of case studies produced now focus on ESG subjects. The campaign has also been one of the driving forces behind the revamp of the school’s programs and the inclusion of sustainability-related subjects.

‘WE WERE RIGHT TO STAY THE COURSE’

When HEC Paris launched its Impact Tomorrow campaign in the summer of 2019, the world was a much different place. The coronavirus pandemic had not yet begun that would kill millions worldwide, shutting down world markets and stifling travel and trade in an unforgettable 18-month depression.

When Covid-19 occurred, Colson says, HEC Paris’s top concern was less raising funds and more taking care of the students, “many of whom were stranded on campus without resources or the means to return to their families. We launched a fundraising campaign towards our alumni community to establish a support fund for students in need, providing both living grants and psychological support. Additionally, we supported the school in fully digitalizing its courses.
Beyond this, we designed new ways to maintain connections with our donors and to continue our campaign.”

But the foundation and school “never altered our ambition, and we were right to stay the course,” she adds.

Of course, as the world has changed over the past five years, new priorities have emerged. “Crisis and the rise of conflicts have led us to significantly strengthen our scholarship programs and to launch the Business & Peace initiative,” Colson says. “This program enables students from conflict-affected countries to pursue their studies in a safe environment while encouraging all students on campus to become ambassadors for peace.

“Covid highlighted the importance of physical connections and the desire among students to have in-person, on-campus experiences. In the aftermath of the Covid crisis, we financed the creation of new sports facilities on campus, as we await the broader campus reinvention project that is currently being developed.”

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