In an article in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning in September 2026, we listed ideas for college and university fundraising efforts. These tie to three recommendations for donors – and not only those making multimillion-dollar gifts.
1. Pooling donations
Donations to colleges and universities don’t have to end in lots of zeros to make a big difference.
In 2015, the grassroots Saving Sweet Briar campaign kept the small women’s college operating even after its trustees had voted to close it. The largest gift the rural Virginia school received was $2 million, and the smallest was $1.50 from a graduate’s grandchild. This is the exception rather than the rule. Financial pressures were too much for Hampshire College, a New England private college that is slated to close after the fall semester of 2026, to withstand – even with a fundraising campaign and $5 million gift from alum and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.
Giving Days are high-profile fundraising campaigns through which many alumni and other supporters raise millions. For example, Oregon State University Dam Proud Day 2026 drew 12,400 gifts and raised over $4.1 million. Purdue University’s annual “day of giving” has generated nearly $500 million over the past decade. In 2024, it garnered $76 million from 32,000 donors.
2. Donating with few or no strings attached
Donations with few restrictions or none at all help colleges and universities meet their greatest needs.
Even if they’re mostly intended for a new building or to fund a particular program, large gifts can also include unrestricted portions to help cover costs as needs arise and priorities change.
Brandeis University, Indiana University, Princeton University and other schools encourage unrestricted annual gifts. These flexible funds are helping to cover research funding shortfalls at Cornell University, undergraduate scholarships at Georgetown University and general operations at the College of the Atlantic.
Novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has given more than $26 billion in unrestricted donations to nonprofits, including to colleges and universities. Historically Black colleges and universities as well as other schools with diverse student bodies, such as Robeson Community College in rural North Carolina, Oklahoma’s Carl Albert State College and Wisconsin’s Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, have received Scott’s big gifts.
In 1920, the trustees of Berea College, a private liberal arts school in Kentucky, passed a resolution placing future unrestricted bequests, donations made through people’s estates, in the school’s endowment. Berea students do not pay for tuition, fees, housing or food – thanks in large part to those unrestricted donations. https://www.youtube.com/embed/7AdJjvQS3Bo?wmode=transparent&start=0 All Berea College students get free tuition, and the small Kentucky school has also committed to covering all other attendance costs too.
3. Helping students afford all college costs so they can graduate
Supporting students directly helps them go to college, stay in school and graduate.
Donors already make gifts that fund schools’ financial aid packages, with about $7 billion in gifts designated for this purpose in 2025. But the colleges and universities that receive the most dollars from donors serve a small fraction of the nation’s undergraduate students – and not those from low-income families. We recommend that donors consider making gifts to the thousands of colleges and universities, including community colleges, that don’t typically draw big donations and have endowments totaling in the millions, rather than billions, of dollars.
Sometimes it takes more than tuition scholarships for students to graduate. Donors can pay for additional expenses, such as transportation and textbooks, and fund extra academic advising and mentoring. Billionaire philanthropists John and Laura Arnold’s Commit2Completion grant program at Arizona’s Maricopa Community Colleges addresses those kinds of often overlooked priorities.
You don’t have to be very wealthy to fund scholarships. Anyone can pitch in through platforms like Dollars for Scholars. This program’s more than 400 chapters enable local donors to pool their gifts to help students raised in their communities pay college expenses. For example, a rural Minnesota chapter awarded $248,000 to 65 college-bound students in 2025.
There are also hundreds of other place-based “promise programs” that provide tuition and fees scholarships to public colleges and universities in their areas and offer programming such as college readiness workshops and access to local employers.
Philanthropy can’t solve every problem higher education faces. But by giving together, donating with fewer strings attached and helping students pay their college expenses, alumni and other donors can be strategic in how they help.
William Blomquist, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Indiana University; Genevieve Shaker, Professor of Philanthropic Studies and Donald A. Campbell Chair in Fundraising Leadership, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indiana University, and William M. Plater, Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus, Indiana University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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