Rich universities continued to attract more aid in 2015

Quartz 30 January 2016

America’s colleges are raking in more money than ever before. The Council for Aid to Education estimates they had a US$40.3 billion haul in 2015, a record for its annual survey of higher education fundraising, writes Melvin Backman for Quartz.

Just 20 schools pulled in US$11.6 billion of those dollars, representing 28.7% of the total. Stanford brought in US$1.6 billion alone (itself a survey record), and Harvard joined it in the billion-dollar club with US$1.1 billion in gifts. The 20 schools on this ranking account for less than 1% of the total number of the nation’s colleges and universities.

There’s an argument to be made that such ferocious fundraising by universities already swimming in cash only serves to exacerbate social and racial inequalities. The US$400 million that hedge fund manager John Paulson gave to Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences last year was only US$100 million shy of the entire endowment of Howard University, the wealthiest of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities.
Full report on the Quartz site

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