A Year-End Plea From a Family Foundation CEO: Think Twice Before Giving to Your Alma Mater

If you are fortunate enough to be thinking about year-end charitable-giving deductions or estate planning, statistics suggest that your college alma mater isn’t the neediest recipient of your largesse.

I love Harvard, and spent some formative years there as a graduate student. I love Duke. As a lucky legacy undergrad, I learned all about basketball, the South and William Faulkner. And yet, when I visit that hallowed ground decades later, I lose my way amid the new buildings named after wealthy alumni.

Elite colleges offer not just heady intellectual spaces, but access to powerful networks and social capital. Send your kids, if you can get them in (without cheating). They will learn where the highest quality bars are set.

But when the development office calls, resist the emotional pull. Philanthropy, cynics say, is motivated by three factors: Fear, guilt — and emotional attachment, which runs deep among college alumni. That last category has sustained higher education to the tune of $11 billion a year contributed by alumni. And that emotional attachment can make it hard for even impact-oriented donors to understand that the biggest bang for their philanthropic dollar may be the community college or state college down the street instead of the well-known institution they once attended.

Raj Chetty (himself a Harvard alum and Stanford University economist) has shed light on institutions with the best record for social mobility, and it’s not the elite ones. As it turns out, low-cost state colleges (not flagships) are doing the best job of pulling students from the poorest families to the highest income groups within a decade. Topping the list are the City University of New York system, some of the institutions that are part of the California State University system, as well as the state university in the Texas Rio Grande Valley.

And compelling new research suggests that community colleges — with a median endowment size of $12 million compared with a median of $142 million for all higher-education institutions according to the NACUBO-TIAA Study of Endowments — actually generate the highest returns for graduates, 10 years after enrollment. Consider the fact that Harvard University’s endowment alone is worth $40 billion and earned a 10 percent return in 2018-19.

Focus on the Future

Alumni philanthropy is about honoring the past by funding the future, but the future of college is changing. In 2013, our family foundation took a different approach — launching a nonprofit Education Design Lab, which I run, to test and build new models for higher education. We discovered, early on, that community colleges — which educate half of all low-income and minority students — are nimble engines of not just economic development, but also educational entrepreneurship.

We found that they have their ear to the ground for employer and learner needs, and they can still provide the physical community and sense of belonging that students say they want, even those who can only afford short-form courses online or at a local community college. In the years since, we have witnessed innovations such as the launch of Calbright College this fall, California’s new statewide online community college for working adults.

In San Antonio, Tex., recently named the highest poverty metropolitan region in the country, the Alamo Colleges District is working with Goodwill of San Antonio to provide advanced logistics certificates that guarantee they have skills that won’t be overtaken by robots — at least for some time to come. The certificates were a response to employers clamoring for more trained workers to fill vacant jobs.

Virginia Western Community College is collaborating with hospitals in Roanoke, Va., to attract and train students for so-called middle-skills roles, such as medical technicians. Without more workers available to fill those roles, the city’s health-care boom would stall.

Upward Mobility

There are at least a hundred similar examples, but it’s usually a scrappy operation, dependent on resourceful people, skilled at getting results on a shoestring. These icons of hope and upward mobility, dotted across every suburban, urban, and rural part of this country, lack capacity and support these changing times require to solve the dramatic shifts in the tech-enabled labor market. JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, raised his voice last week to tout community colleges as an alternative track to most jobs at his global bank. And other high-end employers hold the same opinion. Yet, state funding for higher education has either flatlined or been cut.

If you are like me, you probably get a lot of emails from your alma maters. They know how to find you. But as you are making your year-end gifts or planning for 2020, look beyond your inbox to a community college, or even a regional public university, which often plays the same role. It will be a little more work. They won’t come looking for you: most don’t even have a development office.

Kathleen deLaski, a former board member for George Mason University, is president of the deLaski Family Foundation and founder of the Education Design Lab, a nonprofit that seeks to encourage social mobility by improving learning options and results for nontraditional college students.