Why Give?

There's always tons of interesting stuff in The Atlantic's "primary sources" section in the front of the book. It's kind of like a blog, but in a magazine. Except now, it's also on a website. At any rate, I thought this was a neat finding:

Alumni contributed $7.1 billion to higher education in 2004–05. The study reveals that graduates with children are about 13 percent more likely to give back to their schools and that they tend to give more as their children approach college age. But donations among this group decline after an admissions decision has been made—and plummet if their kids aren’t accepted. Though the authors note that alumni without a stake in the cycle still often give generously, many alums who are parents “believe that donations buy them entrance into a lottery whose prize is admissions for their children.”

It's completely intuitive, of course, but there's still need for proper research to confirm one's guesses about such things. Here's a link to the original paper “Altruism and the Child-Cycle of Alumni Giving,” by Jonathan Meer and Harvey S. Rosen.

Comments

Way more interesting than that study was the one a few pages later in the same issue that surveyed men who used prostitutes regarding their attitudes toward women.

Posted by szr | August 28, 2007 3:46 PM

This is a no-brainer. Affluent parents donate when their kids are due for college because admissions has become intensely hyper-competetive. They want to give their kid any possible edge. So they contribute to colleges, they start SAT prep in 3rd grade, they either pay exorbitant amounts of money for private schools or pay for test programs that place their kids in magnet/specialized schools.

It is ugly out their for high-school aged kids. People who got into Harvard a few years ago (ahem..) would never get in now. I think the acceptance rate for most ivies has been cut in half during the past few years. As long as that holds, they money is going to roll in.

Posted by Unreal Veal | August 28, 2007 4:26 PM

There's a chance I'll be in the strange position of working for a top university when my kids approach college age, and one of the benefits of employment is that employees' kids who go to the school get free tuition. However, they still have to get in through the normal process. It would therefore make sense for me to donate huge amounts of money to ensure admission, although the amount that makes sense is hard to determine since there's still a chance they could not get in even if I gave $100k. (2 kids, total value of free tuition ~$400k.)

Posted by SP | August 28, 2007 4:41 PM

The missing piece here is whether parents' contributions to colleges actually make it more likely that their children will be admitted. Is there any way to research this?

Posted by Hal | August 28, 2007 10:34 PM

Bingo, Hal: Not really news that parents try to lubricate the admissions process with donations. The question is: Does it work? If so, how much should I budget?

Posted by Jim | August 29, 2007 1:08 AM