Over the last few years, conventional wisdom suggested that higher education development officers’ efforts were being stymied by inflationary pressures that depressed giving from everyday donors and alumni boycotts that reached a public crescendo in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
The Council for Advancement and Support of Education’s new Voluntary Support of Education 2024 Key Findings suggests donors didn’t get the memo.
CASE found that philanthropic contributions to U.S. colleges and universities totaled $61.5 billion for the 2023–24 academic fiscal year (July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024), representing a 3% increase over the previous year when adjusted for inflation. Donations from the three largest sources of support — foundations, alumni and nonalumni individuals — rose 13.3%, 7.5% and 4.7%, respectively, over the previous academic fiscal year.
In what has become a recurring theme in CASE’s research, giving was driven by a time-tested philanthropic catalyst, the U.S. stock market, which delivered strong returns during this period.
Add it all up, and the new report calls on readers to look backward and consider whether those highly publicized donor boycotts were isolated incidents at select, high-profile schools, unfolding against the backdrop of a vast higher education fundraising ecosystem awash in cash.
But the findings also have a forward-looking dimension. While CASE tracked giving long before the Trump administration began taking an axe to university research budgets, the data underscores how development officers will be calling on donors to do even more if federal cuts affect the bottom line and Congress increases the 1.4% excise tax on affluent universities’ endowment income, or lowers the per-student endowment threshold so even more universities are covered by the tax.
Regardless of how things play out over the next year, CASE’s new report is a “strong implication of donor confidence in higher education institutions, and certainly in an environment where there have been headlines around donors’ expressing dissatisfaction for different reasons,” said CASE President and CEO Sue Cunningham. “Donors’ willingness to continue to invest in higher education is incredibly positive.”
Alumni continue to fuel the higher education fundraising boom
The 2024 CASE survey collected data on charitable gifts and grants raised from private sources for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2023, and ending June 30, 2024, with a few institutions reporting based on different fiscal calendars. At 736, the total number of participants represents 20.7% of colleges and universities in the U.S. but accounts for 73% of total voluntary support for U.S. higher education institutions in the 2023–2024 academic fiscal year.
CASE tracked giving from alumni, nonalumni individuals, corporations, donor-advised funds (DAFs), foundations and “other organizations,” which includes religious organizations, charitable limited liability companies and fundraising consortia.
Of the $61.5 billion raised by universities in 2024, the largest sources of support were foundations ($20.4 billion), alumni ($12.9 billion), nonalumni individuals ($8.9 billion), corporations ($7.6 billion), DAFs ($6.5 billion) and “other organizations” ($5.2 billion). For a subset of 270 respondents, the average alumnus gift was $3,682, compared to $1,899 for a nonalumnus.
CASE found that 42.5% of foundation support came “from personal and family foundations, some of which are funded by alumni,” suggesting that the “foundation” category acts, to some extent, as a proxy for individual giving. Similarly, many DAFs “are funded by alumni,” while “some corporate giving comes from closely held companies owned by alumni.”
Bottom line? As sure as the sun rises in the East, alumni remain the engine of the higher education fundraising juggernaut.
CASE’s report includes testimonies from individuals like University of La Verve alumnus Luis R. Lopez. “Although I was able to pay tuition myself, I know the value of these scholarships,” Lopez said. “As an immigrant and a first-generation Latino college student, I am excited to help other students go to college.”
These anecdotes add a personalized dynamic to CASE’s quantitative findings, such as how nearly half of all endowed gifts in 2024 were designated for student financial aid. CASE “leaned into including donor voices because ultimately, this is a celebration of the investments that funders choose to make at every level in higher education,” Cunningham said.
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A strong stock market galvanized giving in the 2023–24 academic fiscal year
Before taking on the leadership of CASE 10 years ago, Cunningham worked for 18 years in educational advancement at Oxford University, the University of Melbourne and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In her current role, she leads a membership association with 3,000 colleges, universities and schools in approximately 80 countries worldwide in support of their advancement work.
During our conversation, Cunningham noted that the gross domestic product and the U.S. stock market create “an environment with great potential for philanthropic support.”
Indeed, last year, the S&P 500 rose approximately 23% during the 2023–24 academic fiscal year. The markets were strong in December 2023, which is the time when many donors made their end-of-year gifts.
The link between stock market performance and donor psychology is well documented, but in a nutshell, funders are more inclined to cut a big check or donate stock during flush times. As CASE senior director and study author Ann Kaplan told me on the heels of last year’s report, “When you see your retirement fund is doing well, you think, ‘Well, I can give more money away this year.’”
The decision-making calculus is more nuanced for foundations. Unlike alumni, nonalumni and DAF holders, foundations must disburse at least 5% of their noncharitable-use assets, regardless of how the market is performing, toward qualifying distributions like grants. The good news is that when the market is humming, that 5% payout translates into more money for universities compared to a down period. Moreover, that 5% figure is often higher for foundations helmed by living donors that fuel their operations with incoming contributions.
“Foundations have an obligation to disburse a percentage of their assets each year,” Cunningham said. “But the bottom line is that people understand that higher education has incredible societal impact. I think that’s a powerful message and one that’s not said loudly enough.”
Federal cuts and the recent market downturn raise questions about fundraising in the 2024–2025 fiscal year
The CASE report lands in a higher education fundraising space where universities are confronting a financial situation that “is more challenging now than it has ever been,” said John Griffith, director at Hirtle Callaghan & Co., a Pennsylvania-based investment management firm. “The enrollment cliff, inflation and the increasing financial aid budget sets a stage for an industry in trouble. Adding the research cut and endowment tax to this tenuous situation is a significant blow financially to higher ed. The scale of these challenges is tremendous.”
As far as the Trump administration’s “existential” cuts are concerned, I suspect development officers at affected schools may already be turning to donors to plug funding gaps. Griffith, however, believes this will be a very difficult ask. “Donors for academics are unlikely to shift to funding research,” he said. “Donors give where they are passionate, not based on funding needs. Institutions are unlikely to shift fundraising priorities from the core — academic excellence and student financial aid. These needs are significant and are a higher priority for most universities.”
Then there’s the crucial question of market performance. In next year’s report, CASE will capture giving from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025. The S&P 500 rose roughly 10% from July 1 to early December, which, again, is around the time when many donors make their end-of-year gifts. Since then, however, the index is down roughly 6%, so one of the things to look for in next year’s report will be if donors’ end-of-2024 giving was enough to offset diminished funding after the markets began to swoon.
Until then, universities can find solace in CASE’s recent findings, which point to a resilient sector awash in philanthropic support.
“These are interesting and complex times for the sector, and I think this survey provides the perfect mechanism for taking a moment to reflect,” Cunningham said. “There are many people who are choosing to invest in higher education because of what these institutions are doing to benefit society, and that trust and investment is growing, which is incredibly heartening.”
Note (3/31/25): A previous version of this story stated that Sue Cunningham used to work at St. Andrews College in Australia. She previously worked at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
