Universities finding donations are becoming fewer and farther between

There’s an inter­est­ing arti­cle in the Chronicle of Higher Education this morn­ing about the billion-dollar fundrais­ing cam­paigns at many large universities.

As you can imag­ine, the cam­paigns aren’t going well. The donors who either have pledged money or would have pledged money were hurt by the finan­cial crash and are rethink­ing their donations.

The worst part? Even if the econ­omy starts to recover over the next year, uni­ver­si­ties will still see a “sig­nif­i­cant dip” in giv­ing because many of the large dona­tions are year-long affairs. Some uni­ver­si­ties, like Brown, are even nego­ti­at­ing with their donors to get pledged money sooner at a dis­count. For exam­ple, if Mr. Moneybags has pledged $50 mil­lion in 2011, the uni­ver­sity might per­suade him to give $40 mil­lion now.

At the same time, uni­ver­si­ties are see­ing a surge in enroll­ment num­bers as peo­ple who are out of work look to learn the skills to start off on a new career path.

Of course, dona­tions aren’t the only way that higher edu­ca­tion is funded, but it helps, espe­cially in a time when gov­ern­ments are look­ing for ways to cut spend­ing and find­ing col­leges to be easy targets.

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