Do you support your alma mater financially?

Or look at it this way... the tuition you paid did not cover the cost of educating you. The reason colleges can under-charge is that they're counting on alumni to donate when they have money.

"when they have money."

By that time I will be retired.

When I was an undergrad, there was financial aid and student loans.

When I went to grad school 15 years later, student loans were considered financial aid.

Any money that I might have given to my alma mater gets put into my student loan account so that I can pay it off sooner.

r2 that's why the college system will collapse.

Hell no - not when they build humongous state-of-the-art athletic complexes, yet the school of education building is falling apart.

R1 Colleges UNDERCHARGE? Where did you go to school??

Not much. I've contributed to some very focused programs, positions, and short-term projects, but never large sums, and nothing to more general funds.

Considering that I was treated like trash for being a financial aid student when I was there, the answer is no. The university can hit up their inbred legacy students for donations instead.

My college includes a line on the postcard "check here if you'd like to include College in your estate planning"

UM...WOW.

I did for a while when I was making good money. I went to super-liberal LAC that was extremely supportive of gay rights in the 80s - which meant a lot to a closeted kid from an uneducated family. They also gave me a decent amount of grants and financial aid. Most importantly, the education I got there was fantastic and tuned a kid who just got good grades into someone who loved learning. They taught me not to chase money and to look for deeper meaning in life - which I found has been a great approach to life.

But now that Im barely making any money - and any chance of my nephews/nieces going there has disappeared - I’ve gone back to deminimis annual gift. If I made a lot or didn’t have a lot of family members to leave money to, I probably would consider a big gift.

Fortunately, my alma mater screwed my records up so badly that they have no idea of where I live, and I haven't heard from them in decades. Unfortunately, part of the screw-up was that they lost the fact that I graduated. I was lucky that my mother, after I graduated and moved across the country, saved all of the papers I received from school and when I had to explain to a prospective employer why my school denied that I'd completed my degree, I had the proof I'd graduated still in the box my mother mailed me when she turned my old bedroom into her hobby room.

I am a college professor now, and the growth of administrative services has inflated costs.

The money you donate is not going to pay for teaching professors or even research. It is going to pay for associate deans who create metrics that result in students getting penalized for working their way through school, transferring from community college, changing major, double majoring, taking a minor.

[quote]I had the proof I'd graduated still in the box my mother mailed me when she turned my old bedroom into her hobby room.

I always knew scrapbooking would save someone's life on DL.

R7. You do realize your financial aid was made possible through your school’s endowment, which is largely funded by those in need legacies.

I'm sick of supporting everything... in terms of the rebound. You make one donation and the junk mail I get as a result is appalling. Trees wasted. I'm happy to donate to good causes and I make my donations over the year, every year, but this endless prodding is environmentally unfriendly.

Part of the US News rankings is the percent of alumni who donate. That is a really big part of why they try so hard.

I'll donate 10 or 20 bucks here or there to get them off my back, nothing substantial.

I do. They gave this poor kid so much in financial aid and scholarships that my donations will never equal what I received.

Every appeal has an option to direct the donations, and I usually pick student scholarships or the student GLBT association (though I'm scared to investigate what they might be up to these days).

They have a Kickstarter clone now, and I like giving small amounts to student-club projects that look really creative--social service, theater, music, engineering.

I had a really good college experience there that continues to yield personal, professional, and financial rewards and hope others do too.

Not my college, which is private and rich enough. I do sometimes give to my grad school (UC Berkeley), which needs it more.

I support my state university--UMass Boston. I got an exceptional education that, as an older student, I was motivated to receive and work towards. It had a truly diverse student body, made attaining a degree possible, with loans that were not prohibitive. My graduate school, however, doesn't receive a cent. It was a diploma mill (maybe they all are) that had outdated expected field outcomes.

After being pursued by my alumni association, without ever giving, I asked that they stop. It took several emails and phone calls before they finally purged me from their contact lists. I have no doubt that they sold my name to businesses who they hire (as part of their administrative expenses) to get me to buy something to support the alumni association. Just a big racket to empty our pockets.

Our local public broadcasting station, who I contributed to on an annual basis, kept sending me through the mail requests for a contribution. I reached the person at the station who was in charge of fundraising and said that if I receive another request for a contribution I would stop giving them money. Their mailings to me stopped. It costs to send out those mailings.

I donated a large enough gift to endow a scholarship to a student who was majoring in my obscure field. For many years, I received a short, pro forma letter from that year's recipient telling me a a bit about themselves and why they chose the major. Then one year, I got a letter from the recipient who gushed about her passion for an unrelated field of study. The MOU for my donation dictated that, if nobody was worthy of the scholarship, the funding that year would remain intact and build the principle for future years. After investigating, I learned that the office that managed endowed scholarships had closed and turned responsibility over to the departments. My department had several majors, and just decided to give the funding from my scholarship to a student in the department, but with a different major.

As it happened, I was in that part of the country for work and decided to make a return trip to campus. I made an appointment with a development officer, who gladly accepted. As he greeted me and started soliciting me for money, I explained my purpose for the visit. He almost turned green and within a few minutes, a whole cadre of development officers were in the room. I left campus with assurances that the mistake would be corrected. Since then, I have not received the annual letter from the scholarship recipient. Recently, I received a personalized letter from the VP of advancement asking me to endow a professorship in my field. I wrote back with conditions, including that I get to select a representative to ensure the person they hire truly be in my field. So far, I have not heard back.

I give. I'd like to give more. Like some others, I'm very grateful for the financial aid and education that I received. I got a lot out of my school.

My school recently did a fundraising campaign where we were able to make a donation in honor of a favorite professor or staff member of our choice. I made a donation and was pleasantly surprised to get a card in the mail from the professor who had retired many years ago. That was nice.

r20, that's simply professionally inexcusable, especially for a gift large enough to endow a scholarship. Even if a school closes an endowment office, somebody in development should still have stuff in place to ensure donor intent was in line with new university operations.

Agree with R22 .... Your response to the VP was appropriate ...

I do support both my undergrad and grad school ... as a poor kid, they gave me opportunities Id never have had otherwise. Ive actually made provisions in my estate to support the study abroad program that sent me to Europe for 8 weeks my junior year and covered it with financial aid ... thereby leading to my passion for travel ...

My undergrad school's yearly cost is now $58K. I give about $1K per annum to the endowment for tuition assistance.

I never have and probably never will.

No. All the money would just go to all the associate deans, assistant provosts and other administrators who don't teach but push paper work around. My alma mater has added hundreds of administrators over the years. That's the student debt crisis right there.

I’ve heard the cost increase are due to the new buildings and amenities. Donors will give to the construction to get their name on it - but the ongoing maintenance ends up eating up more money. Kids expect high end facilities now so colleges are competing to create Club Med environments.

It is crazy to me that actual instruction costs are going down as colleges use adjuncts who are paid poverty wages to teach. I’d love to see an analysis of cost increases at colleges over the past 30 years to get some facts on what is driving it.

I’ve stopped. Penn State here- and no more.

R24. I’ll look into that.

Nope, neither my undergrad nor my law school. My undergrad did some shitty things to me while I was there. They supported homophobic professors and administrators. They paid for it with not a dime from me. Also, the petter registrar screwed me out of a double major. I spent a semester overseas and took a history class. The registrar called it a poli-sci class. Despite a note from the European professor of the class confirming that the class was indeed a history class, the registrar, who was narrow-minded and always had to be right, still refused to give me the credit. When I used to get calls (they finally stopped), I would go on a rant about the school and how they weren't getting any money from me.

In law school, one professor, who was as bad as Weinstein with his sexual shenanigans, was protected and I'll never know why. I did battle with him over something that's too long to go into. I won the battle, but I couldn't believe what a fight I had to put up. I finally threatened to expose his latest violation of the ethics code (banging another young, blonde female student) and the school backed down as to my issue but wouldn't fire him. You want to protect that pig, fine, but don't ask me to donate money to a school that would do that.

I donate to the scholarship that paid my undergrad degree. But I paid graduate school with loans, so fuck them!

In the 30+ years since I graduated, I’ve made gifts in less than a third of the years. My priorities for donations have been issues that have less support (services for people w/HIV) or that are more elemental (food pantries). My Alma Mater’s huge endowment (now around $8 billion) will continue to grow with or without my support. The donations I’ve made to my college have mostly been targeted to scholarship programs to help people who are in the same position I was in went I attended: low income, parents didn’t attend college, and/or. Although I worked and took out loans which my more advantaged classmates didn’t have to do, I was the beneficiary of considerable largess from that school. Appreciation of that and the advantages my education afforded me are why I contribute at all.

R13 I should have been more specific. My “financial aid” package consisted of me taking out the maximum in student loans every year, a required on-campus job for at least 15 hours per week at minimum wage, working every summer so I could hand over $2000 to the university every August, and a parental contribution requirement that was so high my father had to scoop into his 401k to cover it.

The school’s financial ‘contribution’ to my education was a few thousand dollar write-off to themselves. Between forcing me to work during the school year and contribute cash every summer, plus the very high parental contributions, they didn’t lose a penny on me.

A few years later I did my PhD, and I got a free ride from that university – they paid for my full tuition, my health insurance, plus a cost of living stipend. They also guaranteed me work study as a teaching assistant at a decent wage. It all came from their endowment and it did indeed cover my graduate education. I was and remain very grateful for it.

"I’d love to see an analysis of cost increases at colleges over the past 30 years to get some facts on what is driving it."

The two tiered wage system, where adjuncts work for slave wages and no benefits, and the elite tenured professors who teach 6 hours/week while their TA's and adjuncts do all the heavy lifting. The rest of the time the full time profs are doing "research" and "writing and publishing." In this case, "research" means running errands, going to the gym, surfing the net, making personal phone calls, networking, talking to their stock brokers, managing their investment portfolios and real estate empires, playing golf and other make busy tasks. Full time wages and benefits for part-time work . Nice work if you can get it.

R34, it depnds on the department. If you are in a stem field or law, you often do not have to teach more than one class a semester.

If you are in the humanities or arts, you teach a lot more and are required to do a large administrative load (not to mention the independent studies that are not required for profs to teach, but are required for students to graduate.)

What R4 said. I got tired of the money begs, do I wrote to the Development Director, listing a number of expensive projects that were poorly conceived, implemented and maintained or discarded. I stated that if I managed my business the way this University was managing it's funds, I would be out begging for money, too.

Then I added a list of projects to which I would contribute, if the school ever got around to undertaking them. I never heard from them again.

Yes, I support both my college and my boarding school. You always pay it forward.

Why would the Henderson Middle School need mah money?

When I get invited to one of their high profile events, then I'll donate.

My kid is in a private 4-yr college now and they are already calling us to donate to the fund. Umm let’s get through paying off these 4 years first before you start asking us for more.

I’m ambivalent whether I’ll donate to my law school.

On one hand, I got a yearly $30,000 scholarship, despite being a privileged white male, because my LSAT score was significantly above the median.

On the other hand, I can’t stand this “diversity” and people of color victimhood crap that they peddle and push, and it’s infecting the local politics of the city. The city is always releasing repeat offenders on the street to commit more crime rather than keeping them in jail where they belong because of the “we are disproportionately punishing people of color” mentality.

The sticker price of the tuition wouldn’t be so high if you didn’t have, for example, an Office for Diversity and Inclusion. Minority students are already oppressed enough with the high tuition price without charging them more to pay for a department that tells them, “Oh, you poor dears, you are people of color, so you’re oppressed, don’t you worry, we’ll protect you here from those awful racist white supremacists and ICE and the police!”

The newest thing is that poor students are unable to afford study-abroad terms.

I'm sorry, but that is just not something I can support financially.

I am approached every year by my university and also the boarding school I attended. I never give anything and never will, but I like the perks of being active in their respective alumni associations, so I lead them on like a total slut.

I graduated in top 25 % of my class and was on the stupid law review (that no one actually reads), but I wasn't "diverse.." Accordingly, I had to pay full retail. Now, I could win Powerball and still wouldn't give my law school the sweat off my balls.

Racketeers.

My friend left $6 million to his alma mater. He hadn’t been there in 70 years, but he didn’t want to leave it to nieces and nephews. I got nothing.

I’m leaving two friends a fair amount. One is a single woman and a teacher and will never have money, so this will be good for her.

My college and my grad school have billions and billions of dollars. Harvard had a 300 million dollar surplus last year. I'm a college prof in Europe where few schools have endowments. (Though it's starting.) A couple teachers and I fund free lunches very discreetly for poor students - and there are plenty. Cafeteria lunches are over 10 bucks at my school. Very high price for some budgets.

A med school lecture hall was named after my father. I went to Yale med school just to spite him.

I meant Emory med school lecture hall.

Absolutely not. They have $30 billion already.

Fuck rapacious colleges and universities, many of them are going under anyway with the decreasing college-bound pool of kids. If you're gay, leave your money to a gay friend, or friends, who may be struggling. Or a gay cause. This is what makes the most sense for is and will make you feel the best about where your hard-earned money is going when you croak.

^us*

My school didn't undercharge. Back in 1990, I paid $10,000 a semester for just tuition. Another $2,000 a year on lab fees and other assorted bullshit. $22,000 a year, plus a small fortune to live in NYC, I don't owe them shit. Plus I had a horrible time there

The alumni office people can track anyone down. I moved to England and did not leave a forwarding address. Three months later, they send me a letter, hitting me up for a donation. That was preFacebook and other social media too

The U.S government should have hired the fuckers in my school's alumni office to locate Osama Bin Laden. That office would have tracked him down within 6 months, maximum.

No way. They can go fuck themselves.

Why would I? It was a mediocre state school (New York) that, other than the fact that I could put the letters 'B.A.' on my resume, was, in hindsight, an unhappy waste of time.

But that's just me.

R56, my masters was a waste of time, too, except for one class. I changed careers and like you, the ‘M.S.’ on my resume was what I really wanted.

R41, are you saying that the minority students at your alma mater are committing crimes and getting released?

R58, no, I’m saying that the people who graduate from my law school end up working in government positions where they push the “woke” narrative that they learn in law school. Example, police end up not being allowed to do their jobs and prosecutors choose not to prosecute repeat offenders, who end up getting released back onto the streets where they commit more crime.

R58, for example, last year when the school had its externship fair, there was a booth for ICE seeking legal externs. Well, the school has a lot of Latino students with illegal immigrant friends and family members (or who may be illegal immigrants themselves). Well, some students got together and protested to the Dean, “We don’t feel safe when ICE is on campus! Please stop the school’s externship relationship with ICE!” So the Dean was like, “Oh my poor babies! I must protect them and make them feel safe!” and she suspended the school’s relationship with ICE, refusing to allow any students to have externships with ICE (not that there had been any student externs with ICE for the last few years anyway).

I was born here and I do not feel safe with ICE officers.

r41 you have some chip on your shoulder that I don't understand. Instead of being grateful for your privilege, you're driving yourself nuts thinking of other people's advantages. Life must be rough.

R54 Yeah, somehow they have my parents' home phone number. I found out one Christmas.

I never understood why US News and World Report uses alumni giving as a factor of whether it is a good school or not.

Many schools are extremely wealthy - they really don't need these small donations.

Plus I'm suspicious of how they calculate alumni giving - I wonder if they've designed programs where people can donate on the behalf of someone else or designate it from someone else.

I give every 5 years. I had a great time, but I'm not worth 8 or 9 figures and my school gets plenty of 7, 8, and 9 figure donations.

Yes, secretly and convolutedly.

Or, rather, I did.

This is one of those things only Americans do that the leads the rest of the world to look at them funny.

No.

When at NYU law I saw that In order to attract a professor to the faculty $25,000 was spent on building a garden on a balcony for his wife.

Let the bitch walk in Washington Square Park to see the flowers.

I’d sooner financially support a small school in a deprived neighborhood.

I received a full government funded scholarship and my parents paid for my books.

I don’t give my alma mater a cent; I give money to homeless charities instead.

government funded scholarship? What the hell is that?

No, but I totally support Alma Mahler.