Colleges breaking $1 billion barrier

Triangle campuses rake in hefty gifts

When UNC-Chapel Hill leaders began to talk in the mid-1990s about a future fundraising campaign, they had so much respect for the B-word, they uttered it quietly. A "billion" dollars. It seemed audacious, almost arrogant.

No longer. More than 50 campuses across the United States have completed or are waging campaigns to raise $1 billion or more, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Stanford University raised more than $900 million just in 2006.

These days, universities campaign for money almost constantly. It is not uncommon for a large university to employ more than 100 people in development offices. Those workers conduct research on alumni, cultivate donors and "make the ask." Helped by a healthy economy and a great influx of wealth from the estates of the World War II generation, universities are reeling in donations with unparalleled success.

The evidence was clear this month when a string of big contributions rained down on Triangle campuses.

Two weeks ago, Duke University announced gifts of $15 million each from the Charlotte-based Duke Endowment and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to finance students' participation in community work and public service. Then, barely a week later, Duke snagged another $10 million in Gates money for scholarships.

Nine miles down the road, $100 million was donated to the private Morehead Foundation, which awards the prestigious Morehead Scholarship to top UNC-CH students. The donation -- one of the largest ever to any U.S. undergraduate scholarship program -- was made by the Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation in Texas. It was a tribute by Mary Cain to her late husband, who made a fortune in the petrochemical business. The famed Morehead Scholarship is now the Morehead-Cain Scholarship.

While the university absorbed that news, UNC-CH fundraisers planned a party with Carolina blue balloons and a cake and sugar cookies iced with the message, "$2 billion and counting."

Last week, a $50 million gift from a former biostatistics professor-turned-businessman inched the university's eight-year Carolina First Campaign beyond its $2 billion goal, 10 months early. The university thanked the donors, Quintiles Transnational CEO Dennis Gillings and his wife, Joan, by renaming the public health school the Dennis and Joan Gillings School of Global Public Health.

"There's just an enormous amount of wealth out there," said Paul Fulton, a UNC-CH trustee and co-chairman of the fund drive.

Since 1999, the campaign has attracted an average of $22 million a month. "Now think about that," Fulton said last week. "That's about $650,000 a day. It's kind of remarkable."

Alumni answer call

The key, Fulton said, is to match a donor's interest with some big project or need at the university, then make an aggressive pitch. And it works. "People are emotional about universities," he said at the campaign party last week. "They really connect with this place."

Alumni are responding as never before. A national survey of 1,014 colleges released last week showed that charitable contributions to higher education grew by 9.4 percent last year to $28 billion. Duke was ranked ninth in the country, with $332 million last year.

The study, by the New York-based Council for Aid to Education, showed that alumni giving jumped by 18 percent, even as the percentage of alumni who give has declined. Alumni participation slid from 12.4 percent in 2005 to 11.8 percent in 2006.

But those who give, give bigger.

In the current campaign, UNC-CH has received 366 gifts of more than $1 million, for 65 percent of the total.